


cura te ipsum

by siluria



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Angst, Big Bang Challenge, M/M, Suicide, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-12
Updated: 2011-11-12
Packaged: 2017-10-26 00:24:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 42,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/276515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/siluria/pseuds/siluria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Enterprise has to delay its long overdue shore-leave when Starfleet loses contact with an isolated research station.  On arrival, they find the station badly damaged after an explosion, and the scientists turning up dead one by one.  There are no explanations, until McCoy is targeted.  From there it’s a battle against time to work out what went on, for McCoy to face what’s happening to him and to find some way to stop it... if he wants to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2011 Star Trek Big Bang.
> 
> Please take a moment to take a look at the wonderful art done by tprillahfiction on livejournal. [here](http://tprillahfiction.livejournal.com/90727.html) Thank you L!

**Prologue:**

*******

 

“Hey Bones. You gonna make it out of there any time before your next shift?”

Leonard dropped his stylus on his desk and turned his attention to the comm. “Hey Jim,” he greeted with a sigh. “I’ve got to get on top of this paperwork or I’m not going to see any of that shore leave you’ve been promising us.”

He ran his fingers through his hair, tugging at the strands in the vague hope that the sharp pain would get his brain back on track. It had been a long hard stretch and none of the crew was running at anything close to their best. Spock probably would calculate the drop in efficiency, but he bet that not even the Vulcan could summon the will to bother anytime soon. Shore leave was five days and about ten light years away, and until then Leonard had to clear some of the damn backlog caused by endless difficult missions, or else he’d be at his desk with engineers trying to repair and upgrade sickbay’s systems around him. Not to mention he still had to clear all those repairs, as well as comment on and approve the upgrades the Starbase engineers were going to fit.

“Five days, Bones, and then you’re not setting a foot inside a sickbay for three weeks. Promise.”

His promise sounded more like a question to Leonard’s ears. It didn’t feel like Jim was promising three weeks off, it was as if he was asking if Leonard was going to tear himself away for that time. He rested his forehead against his hands and stared at the comm unit. “Yeah. Sounds good.” It did sound good, but he knew his voice didn’t carry any enthusiasm, weighed down as it was with exhaustion and stress.

“I guess I’ll see you later then.” Again it sounded like a question, hesitant.

“Yeah.”

The comm sat silent, and Leonard simply stared at it. It wasn’t any easier having the same conversations day after day. He thought it might have been when Jim stopped turning up at the end of his shift, finding the detour a waste of energy when there was always another report to write, or record to change, or crewmember looking for another miracle cure for headaches and lethargy. The comms were worse. He could turn his eyes to other things in order to deny seeing his own exhaustion mirrored in Jim’s pose as he dropped into the chair opposite him; him being the only person who Jim would let see his head dip under the strain. But it was so much harder hearing it.

He couldn’t clamp down on the images that would crawl into his head, of Jim sitting alone in their quarters waiting to see if he bothered to come home. Of how those images would turn to Jocelyn, and a suitcase full of crumpled clothes and stagnant memories, a luggage tag reading nothing but goodbye.

They’d walked into this being honest with themselves and each other. Both wary, both burned. They’d agreed that whenever they were on the ship, the _Enterprise_ and her crew came first. Neither of them had expected an easy relationship. They knew not every day was going to be like their first, but neither had served on a starship before, neither had served under the roles that they’d had thrust upon them either. There was no learning from peers, no sequential promotion on the back of years of good work, and the departing CMO putting in a good word. Leonard ran his department the only way he knew how, relying on experience from dirt-side hospitals and simulations. Jim ran his ship on instinct. And hell, Jim was good at it, settling into command like he was born to it. But, in the end they were the same. Neither delegated well, both needing to show that they were doers, not tellers.

Leonard failed to bite back a yawn, one strong enough to make his eyes tear up. The desk blurred and he scrubbed his hands over his face, the whiskers from a day of growth scratching his palms. He spared a glance at the chrono on the opposite wall and sighed. He’d missed dinner again, yet he didn’t really feel the hunger anymore. He struggled to bring the text on his PADD into focus, his eyes stinging in protest. With another sigh he saved the report, stacking the PADD on top of the three already waiting for attention.

He paused with his hand trailing the edge of his desk, waiting for his body to re-orientate from suddenly being vertical again. His back let him know just what it thought of the hours spent draped over the desk, bringing back all the memories of the down sides of being an intern he’d managed to push back over the years. Sickbay was thankfully quiet when the door to his office slid open, he managed to wave a hand to the staff that bid him goodnight, but the trip back to his quarters was made on instinct. He found himself blinking at his door moments later, wondering how he’d got there or if he’d walked over anyone in the process.

Their quarters were dim, and he stood just inside the doorway until his eyes adjusted. The lights were down enough to see, but not disturb, and he knew from the silence that Jim had already retired. Leonard shuffled through the steps he needed to take to join him, but when he finally reached the archway to the sleeping area he paused.

He couldn’t recall the last time they’d climbed into bed together when it wasn’t with the weight of command or the bleariness of exhaustion leaving a stretch of cold sheets between their bodies. It was longer still since they’d had sex. Jim had initiated it even then, and Leonard had let him take what he wanted, caught up in it enough to get off but not being able to put the stress behind him enough to make it mean anything. The distance between them after left him cold, and he’d lain there staring at the ceiling as he mentally compiled reports and inventories, twitching each time he felt the pull to head back to sickbay and check up on someone or something. That had been the last time they’d been together, and the memory felt sour when compared to all those nights of blinding light and warmth that had gone before.

They may have agreed that the ship came first, but they’d also promised to not let it drive them apart. Standing there with the lights low, Jim asleep and turned away from his side of the bed, Leonard realized that the gap they’d sworn wouldn’t appear was already so wide and he’d never even seen the cracks.

He doubted it would have taken Jim as long to notice what should have been obvious, and he suddenly recognized what those daily visits, now comms, were; a muted attempt to reach out and close the gap. Leonard never responded to Jim’s calls without an excuse. How long would it be before the comms trailed off too and all that was left was a hastily packed bag and a luggage tag? His breath caught as the image came to his mind, and he swallowed hard.

He slipped under the covers, and turned towards Jim. Reaching out a hand, he trailed a finger softly across Jim’s shoulders before letting his hand fall away. He closed his eyes, and wondered which one of them would be the one to wake up to the last vestiges of residual heat in the vacant covers left by the other. Wondered which one of them would scurry away before they could hear other say _I’m sorry… it’s not working._. Wondered why it had taken him so long to see that things weren’t right.

He closed his eyes. Five days. Then he’d make it right.


	2. Chapter 2

*******

 

 _Captain’s Log: Stardate 2260.78  
An emergency has caused the _Enterprise _to abandon its intended heading direct to Starbase 6 and much needed repairs and shore leave. Instead, more distance has been placed between us and Starbase 6 as the ship heads to Bragan IV. Contact has been lost with deep space research post_ Oresme _, a total of 25 staff on an otherwise barren world. The nature of the research and the conditions on the planet necessitate a rapid response, and with the_ Enterprise _being the closest ship we cannot, and would not, turn down a cry for help. The orders are for search and aid, with containment of the facilities and the experiments. Starfleet’s brief ran towards weapons testing and chemical and biological agents and, reading between the lines, they are expecting something catastrophic._

 _Recent events have left engineering and medical, running as best they can with damage marring their surface and supplies running lower than either department head would like. Neither department is in the ideal position to handle a critical incident involving multiple casualties and the threat of containment issues. The crew is running on fumes and determination, but I know they’ll do their best in whatever situation we will face. I just wish I hadn’t had to break those promises I made._

 

Leonard checked the contents of the med-kit one more time, a mental checklist being crossed off as he made sure items were packed in order of what was likely to be needed most. Once they made orbit the scans made for a depressing read. Of the twenty-five staff on the base, the scanners could only pick up ten life-signs, mostly congregating within the eastern wing. The western wing of the base had practically been obliterated, and there were enough chemicals floating around to put a man down in minutes. His med-kit was packed to counteract the effects of the chemicals they’d identified, the rest to treat compression injuries until they could be sure people were safe to transport back to the ship. Leonard had seen what some of these agents could do first hand, he knew they needed to act quickly and there was no telling how long the people had already been suffering.

Spock was confident the area in which the survivors were collected was now safe and sealed off from the effects of the explosion and the airborne chemicals. That was why Jim was happy for the first transport to be medical staff, Jim tagging along. Leonard glanced at his medical team, and they nodded their readiness. He shouldered his pack and waited for Jim to give the word. Jim was finishing off his talk with the team of engineers, already kitted out in environmental suits. Once they got the all-clear from Jim, Scotty was taking a team and beaming directly to the affected area of the site.

Leonard breathed deeply, feeling the first wave of adrenaline that he hoped would carry him through the next however many hours. He shuffled his feet on the pad, shifting his weight to accommodate the pack as Jim walked over, answering the apologetic smile with a shrug of his shoulders. It wasn’t Jim’s fault. And as much as Leonard wanted to step down off the pad and carry on walking out of the room until he could collapse into his bed, duty came first.

Jim’s single order to energize shook him from his thoughts, and moments later he was blinking at the marred surfaces of clinical white that was the _Oresme_ research station. Some of the access panels were pulled from the walls, and blackened frames around their edges indicated the seats of fires. The ceiling panels were down in a haphazard checkerboard pattern, those that remained were seemingly holding the mass of wires and conduits at bay with sheer will.

Chatter ceased at their appearance, the lack of comms making their arrival sudden and unexpected. Jim introduced himself and the reason for them being there, and the relief at his words was palpable.

One woman stepped forward, her black hair was aged with gray in random patches, clinging messily to her scalp, whatever style it had been cropped to now a casualty of the last few days. “Lieutenant Hudson, Sir. I can’t say how glad we are to see you, we hoped Starfleet would send someone soon, but we just couldn’t estimate how long that would be.”

To Leonard’s eyes she looked tired and drawn, but to his relief he couldn’t see any outward signs of injury or ill-health. Her blue uniform was torn a little in the sleeves, each rip edged with rusted red blood, but there was no obvious injury on the skin below to indicate anything that required attention. Her tall, slender frame was held straight in the face of a superior officer, but there wasn’t any strain to her features that would speak of injury.

“Can you tell us what happened?” Jim asked.

“There was a massive explosion in one of the chemistry labs eight days ago, we’re not sure how it happened, and unfortunately we lost the scientists who were working in that area.” Her voice tailed off, and she blinked, the aborted wave of her hand seemed like a plea for them to understand without her having to say the words. Jim nodded, prompting her to continue. “We’ve lost most of the computer system too, including communications which is why we couldn’t call for help. All the power we have left has been re-routed into life-support and keeping this area secure. We lost nine people in the explosion, and we only have one engineer left. He’s trying to make things safe, Dorcas is helping him as best she can, but we barely have anything left to work with, not on something of this magnitude.”

“Do you have any injured?” Leonard asked.

Hudson shook her head. “We did, but Dr Dorsey has been working miracles.”

“You said you lost nine in the explosion, we only detected ten life-signs,” Leonard asked. Hudson’s face fell briefly and she glanced over her shoulder at one of the ensign’s. He seemed to crumple, sitting himself down on the nearest chair and burying his face in his hands. Leonard frowned. “What?”

Hudson licked her lips, and glanced at the floor. “We did lose nine in the explosion. Five people have died since then, but we don’t know how or why. Lieutenant Monfils disappeared yesterday, we’d hoped…”

Her sentence wasn’t finished, and Leonard didn’t need it to be. He turned to Jim briefly, seeing his own concern reflected in the tight line of his lips. “Where’s Dr Dorsey?” he asked.

Hudson sniffed, and straightened her shoulders. “He’ll be in medical, Sir, I’ll show you the way.”

Leonard turned to Jim for approval, but he’d already pulled out his communicator.

“Scotty, you’re good to go, but I need you to add two security members to your team.”

“ _Aye, sir_ ”

“You’ll probably rendezvous with a station engineer and one other member of their staff. Can you also ask Lieutenant Marshall to beam down to my coordinates with a team of four, we’ll be sending the medical team back up, minus Dr McCoy, as it would appear they’re not needed. Let me know what you find, Scotty. Kirk out.”

Jim placed the communicator back on his belt and turned to Hudson. “Lieutenant, are you sure no-one else needs medical attention?”

Hudson shook her head. “Other than the people we lost straightaway, Dr Dorsey has given everyone a clean bill of health.”

Jim’s attention turned to him. “Bones, go talk to the doctor, see if you can work out what happened to the others. I’m going to send your team back to the _Enterprise_. I’ll wait here for Marshall, then we’ll see if we can find Lieutenant Monfils.”

Leonard nodded and waved a hand for Hudson to lead the way. His eyes met Jim’s as he passed him, it wasn’t hard reading the order to be careful in his gaze.

The medical bay in the station was closer to the affected area and it showed in the damage. The doors were only half open, one wedged shut by the crumpling of its metal, the other stuck open. Leonard followed Hudson’s lead and eased through the gap, noting that half of the room was practically unusable, scorched black by fire and partially collapsed. The other half of the room showed damage, but the displays on the single biobed, and the equipment dotted around seemed to be intact.

“Dr Dorsey?”

At Hudson’s call, a man stepped out from what appeared to be a store room, wiping his hands on a cloth. His smile of greeting dipped a little when he saw McCoy, but he straightened up and stepped forward to greet him.

“Dr Dorsey, this is Dr McCoy, the Chief Medical Officer of the _Enterprise_. Starfleet thankfully sent them in response to our communication blackout.”

“Sir. Kenton Dorsey.”

Dorsey was a slight man, and seemed not much older than McCoy, but stood several inches shorter. His fair hair was longer than regulation would normally approve of, swept off his forehead in an elaborate curl that showed none of the strain that Hudson’s own hair displayed. Leonard shook Dorsey’s outstretched hand and smiled. “Leonard McCoy. No need for formality, we’re both doctor’s.” Dorsey nodded. “Looks like you took a hell of a hit in here.”

Dorsey glanced around his sickbay before shrugging. “We were fortunate that it wasn’t too bad. Most of the equipment and supplies were unaffected, and I was kept too busy at first to worry about it.”

“The Lieutenant here said you’d done a good job.”

Dorsey smiled widely and glanced towards Hudson briefly. “I managed to get in there quickly to counteract the effects of the air-borne chemicals, plus the engineer worked very quickly on containment. We keep the sickbay stocked with the correct countermeasures for whatever chemicals we carry – it’s standard procedure. After that, it was just a case of dealing with the shock and injuries sustained with the explosion.”

“There were some serious injuries. We were worried about Hari and Talissa for a couple of days, but Dr Dorsey managed to bring them through just fine,” Hudson said.

McCoy nodded, “That’s good to hear. However, Lieutenant Hudson mentioned that you had some unexplained deaths that occurred after?”

Dorsey frowned. “Yes…” he started carefully. “I’m not quite certain what I can tell you, but maybe you can take a look at the files and see if I’ve missed something.”

“What about the bodies?”

Dorsey glanced at Hudson before he turned his gaze to the floor. “We’re not equipped here to carry morgue facilities, certainly not to the capacity for half of the staff here. We had to dispose of the bodies.”

Leonard breathed deeply. “It’s fine. I’ll take a look at the files.”

Dorsey nodded and retreated to what Leonard expected was an office. Hudson shifted besides him. “Sir, if you’re okay here with Dr Dorsey, I’ll go see how Logan is doing. He… well, him and Lieutenant Monfils were…”

"It’s okay, Lieutenant,” Leonard interrupted. “I’ll be fine.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Leonard ignored her formality, and apparent relief at being able to leave, and watched her go.

“Bones?”

Leonard stepped out into the corridor at Jim’s call, nodding to the gathered security team. All but one was dressed in environmental suits, their search no doubt taking them into the affected area of the station.

“Did you manage to find out what happened?” Jim asked, keeping his voice low as he pulled him to one side with a hand to his elbow.

Leonard glanced at the open doorway to sickbay and shook his head. “Not yet, Dorsey was just going to dig out his files, hopefully he’ll give me a rundown. They don’t have the facilities here and so they disposed of the bodies. Until you can locate the Lieutenant I’ll be working off the scans.”

Jim nodded, his gaze drifting over the damage the corridor had sustained. “Look, I’m not happy about transporting any of the staff here up to the ship until we can be sure what killed those five people. Everything seems secure enough in this sector from exposure, and I’m leaving Scotty to neutralize the rest of the chemicals before he starts with the structural integrity. I’ve had some supplies transported down, clothes, food etc. I’m going to leave Erikksson here with you until we can get some answers.”

Leonard glanced at the one un-suited security officer and nodded, knowing there was no point in trying to change Jim’s mind. “How long are you planning on staying out there on the search?”

“Until we’re done,” Jim sighed. “Not the happiest search I’ll have been on but I can’t leave a man down. Spock ran the scanners from the ship, but there’s nothing within this section of the station. There are too many chemical and biological agents loose from the explosion for the sensors to be accurate beyond this sector, so we’re widening the search on foot. If we have to, we’ll extend it to the outside.”

Leonard rubbed a hand over the back of his neck, not envying Jim’s search at all. He needed to see what was in the files to determine what, if any, the danger was; something he’d prefer Jim knew sooner than when it was too late. “I better get back in there. I’ll comm you if I get any answers.”

Jim clapped a hand to Leonard’s shoulder, his touch lingering. “Stay safe.”

Leonard snorted and managed a lopsided-smile. “You too.”

He watched Jim and his team head off down the blackened corridor until he disappeared around the corner. He turned to Erikksson. “Are you staying here or is there something else you need to do?”

“Sir. The Captain ordered me to stay with you.”

Leonard shrugged, figuring as much. “In here then.” He stepped into the medbay again, not needing look back to know Erikksson was following. He knew enough about Jim’s security teams to know that if he stopped suddenly he’d have a new shadow dancing with his own.

Dorsey was waiting with a PADD in his hand. He eyed the security officer, but didn’t comment. He held out the PADD as he started speaking, which Leonard took and began to flick through. “The files are all there in order of the discovery of the bodies. I didn’t have too much time to carry out complete or detailed autopsies, my concerns being with the living at the time. I have to be honest and admit I haven’t had the chance to revisit the files either.”

Leonard glanced up from the PADD. “I take it you’re not aware of the suspected death of Lieutenant Monfils?”

Dorsey frowned and shook his head. “I… well I knew she’d failed to come back with the engineer from the site of the explosion, but I didn’t realize that she was dead. She’d only gone down to the labs to see if there was anything left that still required containing in her experiments. She was working on some of the more unstable compounds within the base and she wanted to help secure the site.”

“So what was your overall gut feeling with the deaths? Any patterns, or plausible causes of trauma?” Leonard turned his gaze back to the files, reading the results of the brief scan that had been carried out on the first victim. The internal injuries suggested a violent encounter, but there didn’t appear to be any surface injury or bruising.

Dorsey hefted himself up onto the edge of the biobed, gesturing an offer to Leonard to take the seat at its side. Leonard shook his head, preferring to stand when he was working, a habit he hadn’t felt the need to break himself out of. _Ponder and pace_ Jim’s voice sounded in his head, the comment coming once on the back of a complaint Leonard had made about the pain in his feet being worse than in his head. Not that Leonard could deny the truth in Jim’s comment.

“I didn’t think too much of it at the time,” Dorsey said. “I’d been battling the symptoms from the airborne chemicals, trying to patch up the wounded. I had barely slept for five days, and I know that’s no excuse, but I signed off on the death certificate with an unknown cause, and tried to concentrate on the living. By the time I thought about filling out the report with more details the second body had been found. There were similarities in terms of internal trauma, but there was still no obvious cause.”

“So, the first death was five days after the explosion, the second 17 hours later, and then the rest were in pretty quick succession,” Leonard said flicking through the headings for the reports. “The last was only yesterday, and Monfils disappeared yesterday also?”

“That’s right. With the station running on limited resources we just couldn’t preserve the bodies so we made the collective decision to have a service and dispose of them. We’d finished that only a few hours ago. If we’d known you were coming and were so close…”

Leonard raised his head to look at Dorsey. The man’s head was bent head, leaving his gaze fixated on his hands clasped in his lap. Leonard expected he’d have done the same in the circumstances. Hell, he had the benefit of an almost fully functioning sickbay and his staff, exhausted as they were, and even he was struggling to find enthusiasm for necessary reports. The thoughts of shore leave had been the only incentive the last few days. “I understand. I can’t say it’s in line with protocols, but then field medicine has to adapt to the circumstances and putting the priorities and safety of the living ahead of the dead is the only way. So what’s your opinion?”

Dorsey lifted his head, his eyes dropping away from Leonard's gaze before he could even meet it and to the PADD in Leonard’s hand. “Internal trauma, seemingly represented by crush injuries to key organs, no outward signs of blunt force trauma or external force. I’d hate to say what could cause it, Sir, but I don’t think it could be anything human.”

Leonard nodded once, his thoughts had been along similar lines, but there was still something niggling him.

“The planet is dead,” Dorsey pointed out. “The reason this station was sited here was because there was no ecosystem to be effected by whatever experiments we ran, and no claim of ownership on the planet. Most of the chemicals and technology we use and develop here are designed for weapons. It’s not something to be proud of, but it’s a necessary evil after what happened with the Romulans. I’m sure you understand what with having firsthand experience.”

Leonard clenched his teeth and glared at Dorsey. Just because they’d come against a foe far greater than they could imagine, and survived, didn’t mean that he supported the next generation of weapons that could repeat the whole damn situation all over again.

Dorsey clearly sensed his feelings, as he raised his hands apologetically. “I’m sorry, that was unforgivable. What I should have said is that this planet doesn’t show any signs of life outside of this station. The atmosphere is perfectly safe for us to go walk around outside, or was before the explosion, but there’s nothing alive out there to see.”

Leonard read the files in the silence that followed Dorsey’s last comment, each set of scans spelling out a similar picture, but he got the sense that there was something more to this. The spacing between the attacks became exponentially less, but that wasn’t what worried Leonard the most.

The first death had been violent, but quick. If the internal injuries had been mirrored by what should have shown on the epidermis, then his diagnosis would have been a physical attack, frenzied blows intended to hurt the most vulnerable areas: head, heart and lungs. The scans of the brain chemistry supported that theory, but in the absence of any bruising or trauma to the skin or muscles, that wasn’t a diagnosis that was easy to make.

The worry rose with the fact that the clues indicated that each successive death had been more drawn out. The internal injuries were less widespread, instead being restricted to specific areas, targeted to cause the most damage and prolong the suffering. It all suggested that while the first death might have been a violent impulsive response, the latter ones were calculated, and the purpose wasn’t reactionary but intentional. The lessening distance between deaths made him think that the attacker had got something out of the first killing and had craved more.

His problem was that there wasn’t a single species he was aware of that could cause such damage without a mark being left on the skin that covered those organs. However, whatever or whoever had caused this knew exactly where to do the most damage to a human body right from the outset. But then the sensors had picked up nothing alive outside of the officers within the station.

Leonard lowered the PADD and scratched the back of his neck, raising his gaze back to the doctor. “What kind of biological agents were being worked with?” he asked quietly. Two years ago he would have sworn that black holes could never be caused by a single drop of liquid, god only knew what orders Starfleet had given to a generation of scientists caught between anger and grief because of it.

Dorsey slipped to his feet from the biobed, his arms folded defensively over his chest. “Nothing that I’m aware of that could result in those kind of injuries.”

“I’m not worried about the agents directly inflicting those injuries, I’m more concerned about whether there’s something that is capable of causing reactions in people that are exposed; a reaction that might cause those that are infected to turn violent. You deal with military-based research, and I wouldn’t put it past Starfleet to look at creating new ways of improving their soldier’s effectiveness. Maybe not even organic agents, but bio-tech. Do you have anything like that here?”

Dorsey leant back against the bed his head dipped in thought. “I don’t know.”

Leonard heard Erikksson shift behind him. He’d pretty much forgotten that the security officer was still lingering, but the noise he made suggested to Leonard that he’d been listening to the conversation, and the route it had just taken had made him wary. Leonard tapped his finger against the edge of the PADD. “Who _would_ know?”

“No one that’s still alive.” Dorsey’s voice was hushed. “The computer is designed to lock down all information about elements and experiments if something catastrophic takes place in case of outside interference. We couldn’t get to that information even if the computers were fully operational.”

“Convenient,” Leonard muttered. It begged the question as to what exactly had been worked on down here, and whether Monfils heading back to the labs to try to contain whatever she had been working on was a sign of a breach that could have caused the deaths to happen. Whatever her reasons for going back to the lab, it may have resulted in her being a target.

He dug his fingers into his forehead as he tried to rub away the onset of a headache, startling as the chirp of his comm echoed loudly in the near silent medbay. “McCoy.”

“ _Bones, do you have anything yet?_ ”

“Excuse me,” he muttered before stepping into the corridor, putting some distance between him and the medbay as he walked towards the more blackened corridors.

“Nothing you probably want to hear Jim,” he said, his voice lowered. He turned his head towards the flash of red that appeared in the periphery of his vision, holding up a hand to forestall Erikksson moving from the doorway he’d emerged from, clearly taking Jim’s orders seriously. Leonard edged further away, ignoring the worsening charred smell that made his eyes sting.

“ _What do you have?_ ”

“All the injuries are internal, targeted to major organs with no outward sign of surface injury to show the cause. Whoever did this knew where to hurt.”

“ _You said whoever. Does that mean you think the cause is human?_ ”

Jim’s voice sounded strained, muffled as it was by the environmental suit, and McCoy felt a twinge of regret at adding to his obvious stress. “I don’t have all the answers right now. All I can say is that while I could class the first death as an unplanned attack, the rest show all the signs of someone taking their time and enjoying what they’re doing. Someone who knows about human anatomy to determine where to do the most damage.”

There was a pause before Jim spoke. “ _So you’re saying that someone is killing for fun after getting a taste of it, but as of yet you have no idea how?_ ”

Leonard closed his eyes and sighed. “Yeah, that about covers it,” he muttered.

“ _What are you thinking?_ ”

Leonard paused before answering. Jim knew him well enough to read between the lines to know there was something he wasn’t saying, but gut feeling wasn’t an answer Jim could act on. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “It’s just we know they were working on both chemical and biological agents, and every one of the biologists is dead. They’ve contained the chemicals, but what if there are biological agents we can’t detect?”

“ _Something that could allow someone to kill without leaving a physical mark on the body?_ ”

Leonard waved his hand in frustration, even though he was aware that Jim couldn’t see his gesture. He glanced over his shoulder at Erikksson who was still standing in the doorway. “I just don’t know,” he admitted, voiced hushed, hating that he didn’t have any answers. “I know it sounds crazy, hell we’ve seen enough crazy shit over the last couple of years to learn not to ignore the impossible. I’m just worried that with Starfleet’s need to be able to prevent another Vulcan that they’ve engineered some bio-agent or bio-tech that’s turned around and bit them on the ass.”

He paced a few steps further from the medbay. He had no idea where to start looking for a problem he didn’t have any evidence to say it existed. Were they looking for a bacteria, an implant, a response to a built-in chemical trigger? Or was the threat something much bigger, a dark shape in the shadows they needed to fight off?

“There’s a reason Starfleet picked a dead planet for its weapons testing,” Leonard said quietly. “Monfils went back to the lab for a reason, Jim. I just don’t know if that was to contain something or to effectively turn it off. The explosion could just be bad timing that let something loose, but it could be the other way round.” Whatever that something was, Leonard mused.

“ _Alright. We need to keep looking to see if Monfils can give us any answers from beyond the grave. Can you see if you can get anything from the station staff? Maybe she confided in her Ensign or one of the other scientists, enough that might give us a clue as to what we could be dealing with._ ”

“Yeah, sure.”

“ _And Bones?_ ”

“Yeah Jim?”

“ _Unless you have anything solid, keep your theories from the others. If one of the scientists is affected by something and knows what they are doing, I don’t want to provoke a reaction just yet._ ”

Leonard glanced back at the medbay again. “Dorsey already knows, I asked him about the bio agents, but I’ll get him to keep it quiet for now. Same for Erikksson.”

Jim signed off and Leonard shut the communicator before putting it back on his belt. He blinked away some of the moisture from his eyes before tearing his gaze from the blackened corridor. Erikksson stepped to one side, and Leonard nodded to him as he slipped back into the medbay.

Dorsey placed the PADD he’d been studying on the biobed as they both entered. “Is everything okay?”

Leonard turned so he could flick his gaze between Dorsey and Erikksson. “There’s still no sign of Monfil’s body, so we need to question the others to see if we can find out what she was working on that had her so concerned as to head back to the lab area. For now we need to keep what we know, and what we think, quiet until we have some more answers.”

“I’m not sure talking to the others is a good idea Dr McCoy,” Dorsey said, his voice low, but determined.

Leonard frowned. “And why’s that?”

“Because they can’t tell you what they don’t know.”

Leonard sensed Erikksson shifting behind him as he turned his full attention to Dorsey. Dorsey was certain in his proclamation and there was a change in the air that raised the hairs at the back of his neck. He frowned. “And what makes you so sure that they don’t know?”

Dorsey laughed, and it wasn’t a pleasant sound. Behind him, Erikksson sucked in a hoarse breath, and Leonard turned to face him. Erikksson’s wide eyes turned in his direction. Leonard could tell that he wasn’t breathing, and he seemed frozen in space, his hand hovering above his phaser, a move that had been stopped before it could be completed. Leonard took a step toward him, but before he could take another he felt his body freeze, and no matter how much he willed it to move he could do little more than move his eyes.

He watched helplessly as the light dimmed in Erikksson’s eyes, unable to lift a finger to prevent it. The _no_ ’s were a staccato in Leonard’s thoughts, not with fear for himself, but with the heartbreak that he couldn’t help. He knew the instant that Erikksson died, and he squeezed his eyes shut until they watered. When he opened them again Erikkson’s lifeless face still stared back at him, fear frozen in his features. He couldn’t look away. But then the officer’s body crumpled to the floor and Leonard’s vision filled with Dorsey’s face.

“I know what you’re thinking.”

Leonard gasped as Dorsey’s words echoed in his mind.

“I don’t know what caused it, whether it was something we were working on here or not, but you don’t know what it’s like.”

Dorsey’s spoken words mixed with the vibration of the timbre in his head, a combination of desperation and awe. The headache that niggled before now flamed behind Leonard’s eyes. His fingers twitched but that was all the movement he could manage. Dorsey leaned towards him and Leonard felt an invisible hand push against his chest, a band tightening around his lungs causing his breath to stutter.

“I thought I was dead when the explosion hit, but I felt great when I woke up. The others… well, they started to think I was going mad, and maybe I was when I began to hear what they were thinking, and sense what they were feeling. We all lost someone we cared about, and they were suffering. They aren’t suffering anymore.”

The chirp of his comm suddenly broke into Leonard’s awareness, the sound barely heard over the pulse of blood rushing past his eardrums. He spared a thought as to what warnings from the biosensor readings were flashing up on the bridge, glad Jim wasn’t sitting in his chair watching them.

“It’s so easy,” Dorsey said, the sound of wonder clear in his voice. And as his hand clenched into a fist, Leonard felt a vice clamp around his heart. “You can see it, can feel it as you literally squeeze the life out of someone. Imagine yourself squeezing someone’s windpipe.”

And Leonard felt that, each breath a gasp under a steadily growing pressure, his body trying and failing to force air into his lungs. The clench within his chest burned until everything went numb and his vision blurred gray. His thoughts drifted to Jim, of how he should never have waited for the start of their shore leave, of how he was too cowardly to say _I’m sorry… I’ll make this work_ when he realized he needed to.

“Don’t worry,” Dorsey’s voice echoed in his head, gleeful in a sing-song way that spoke of madness. “I’ll let him know.”

Gray faded to black. His last thought, _I’m so sorry_.


	3. Chapter 3

*******

 

It was a sense of falling that caused his body to jerk and his eyes to fly open. His heart beat rapidly in his chest as he tried to suck in enough air to calm down, blinking quickly as he tried to bring something into focus. As he stared at the white ceiling above him, the sounds started to creep into his awareness, familiar in their cadence, until he was certain he was in his own sickbay.

“Bones?”

He blinked again and turned towards Jim’s voice, only then did he feel the hand that gripped his. Jim looked pale and drawn, and the smile he managed was weak, even if Leonard could tell it wasn’t forced. Leonard swallowed and licked his lips, trying to sort out in his head how he got here amidst the fog that shrouded his mind.

“What happened?” He cleared his throat when the words sounded gritty.

Jim’s smile dipped, his eyebrows knitting together before he dropped his gaze.

“Jim?”

He sucked in a deep breath before he answered. “You died.”

Leonard opened his mouth to respond, but stayed quiet as his memory started to answer the questions that had slipped into his mind. “Dorsey?”

“Dead. As is Erikksson. Bones, what happened down there?”

Leonard heard the plea in his voice. He carried out a mental health check, focusing on the areas where he had felt Dorsey’s phantom touch. But there was nothing out of the ordinary, no bruising he could feel tightening his skin, no sharp pain when he took a deep breath. He slowly sat up, swinging his legs to the side until he faced Jim. Jim scrambled to his feet, his free hand had reaching out to steady him, his other maintaining the grip he had on Leonard.

“Are you okay?”

Was he? He wasn’t sure he could answer that until he got a good look at his medical records, remembering everything that Dorsey had said. In the end, he said the only thing he could. “Yeah, I feel fine.”

He watched as Jim’s eyes scanned his face, no doubt looking for any indication that he was being less than honest. Leonard let Jim satisfy himself, knowing the moment he believed him when Jim's shoulders relaxed. He felt the heat from Jim’s hand where it came to rest on his waist, clutching at his uniform shirt. Jim leant forward until his weight was pressed against Leonard’s knees, their foreheads touching.

“Shit Bones,” he whispered. “I thought…”

“S’okay,” Leonard murmured, rubbing his free hand up and down Jim’s arm. “I’m here.” His words were an attempt to convince himself as he swallowed heavily trying to dislodge the memory of the phantom hand that had gripped his windpipe.

“Spock commed me when Erikksson’s life-signs ended. All I could hear in the background was the wail of your biosensors. They went silent before I could get to you. When we got to the medbay Erikksson was dead, Dorsey was barely recognizable, and everything said you were dead too.” Jim sucked in a ragged breath. “But when I reached you, you were breathing and I… What the hell happened?”

“What happened to Dorsey?”

The grimace on Jim’s face told him it wouldn’t be pleasant, but his last memory was of Dorsey’s insane happiness in what he could do, and how he was going to tell Jim all about it. He thought he’d died. Something must have happened for him to still be alive and Dorsey to be… what?

“He’s dead,” Jim finally said. “But M’Benga has no idea what did it. It’s as if fifty years of life were sucked out of him, leaving him withered and desiccated. I just… I haven’t seen anything like it. We cleared the planet on the presumption that it’s something down there, but we’ve initiated quarantine until we can be sure it’s not someone on the team, or that it’s an infection.”

McCoy finally moved his gaze from Jim, glancing over the familiar isolation room of his sickbay. He had no doubt that Jim would have refused point blank to leave his side, no matter what M’Benga said. Although if anyone was going to be affected on the away team it would be him and he was putting Jim at risk. “Where’s M’Benga?”

“I’ll comm him, although he’s probably hovering, you’ve been out for nearly five hours. But, I just need to know what happened.”

Leonard swallowed, and he felt Jim’s hands squeeze a little tighter. “Dorsey. He said he didn’t know how it happened, but sometime after the explosion he started to be able to hear what the others were thinking and what they felt. Erikksson…” He licked his lips against the helplessness he’d felt watching the life slip from the young officer, not being able to lift a finger to help.

Jim pulled away, far enough to get a good look at his face. “Bones?”

He cleared his throat and raised his eyes to Jim’s a silent plea for him to understand. “He just… it was so fast and I couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything other than watch him die.”

Jim’s hand moved from his waist to cup his face, and he swore he didn’t deserve the ready forgiveness and acceptance in Jim’s eyes, no matter how many times he’d freely offered the same in return to his grieving Captain. He dropped his eyes. “I swear Jim, I couldn’t…”

“Shh, it’s okay,” Jim whispered, his lips brushing against his temple.

His fingers flexed and gripped Jim’s hand tighter. “I tried to move, but I couldn’t. Dorsey’s voice was hammering in my head and he was insane, Jim. He thought he was helping by ending their suffering, but it was as if he thought he was a God. And then it felt like hands, the pressure just squeezing and I couldn’t breathe, and he was going for you next. Then I woke up here and I don’t know what happened. But I’m sorry, I’m so sorry…”

He knew he was babbling, knew rationally that it was survivor’s guilt, pain at what he’d put Jim through, relief at being given that chance to make the apology that he never thought he’d be able to say. And he knew that Jim had no idea at what he was truly saying sorry for, but he took the comfort Jim offered, burying his face into Jim’s neck when he pulled him close. His hands tangled in the fabric of Jim’s uniform, the slight scratch of the fabric against his fingertips a welcome distraction. He breathed deep, filling his senses with Jim’s warmth and security, and that familiar scent he called home.

He let his grip loosen as Jim eased back from the embrace, his hands cupping Leonard’s face as he pressed the lightest of kisses to his lips. “Don’t be sorry. I’m not sorry you’re alive, I’ll _never_ be sorry for that. I thought I’d lost you and I couldn’t deal with that, you hear me?”

“Yeah,” he breathed. He believed Jim; because when it came down to it, he was selfish enough to feel the same.

Jim’s hands dropped away slowly as the door to the isolation ward slid open to allow M’Benga to enter. Leonard’s hand caught one of Jim’s before he could put too much distance between them though. M’Benga approached with a smile on his face and a PADD in his hand.

“I take it we’re no longer maintaining quarantine?” Jim asked, before M’Benga could speak.

M’Benga shook his head. “I can’t find any reason to enforce it. If there was some contagion I would have expected some or all of the station staff to show abnormalities in the battery of scans and tests, but other than the usual indicators of stress and dehydration, I have to give them a clean bill of health.”

“And the away team?”

“Again Captain, nothing out of the ordinary.”

“And me?” Leonard asked, wary of what the response would be.

“Well,” M’Benga smiled, “I’m very glad to be able to say you’re fine too. The only sign of anything different is what I can only presume is why you’re still alive.”

“Which is?” Leonard held his hand out for the PADD, which M’Benga handed over after a brief nod from Jim.

“Maybe you can come up with something to explain it based on what you experienced on the planet, but all I can say is that that your brain patterns look like you took a shock to the system. All I can liken it to is the electroconvulsive therapy they used to perform on psychiatric patients back in the 20th Century. The neurotrophic levels are definitely up, which would be in line with that, although there’s no sign of pinpoint hemorrhaging and if anything, instead of the usual reduction in cell number, the scans show an increase.”

“Which means?”

Leonard looked up from the PADD at Jim’s question. “Basically not a lot,” he said, shrugging. “They used to employ the treatment to induce mild seizures, figured they could shock the depression or mental issues out of someone instead of doing their damn job and getting to the root of the problem. It was barbaric, even for that time in history. There was always some degradation to brain structure over time, but in relation to each treatment the noticed side-effects were mostly in the memory.”

“Which you seem to be fine with,” Jim said tentatively.

Leonard kept hold of the PADD as he slipped from the biobed to his feet. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Jim twitch, but the other man didn’t reach out this time. “Memory is fine, Jim, it’s just the explanation of what happened while I was out that I’m missing. There’s nothing in my charts to say I can’t get out of here,” he said to M’Benga, the question clear in his choice of words.

M’Benga shrugged. “I can’t dispute that, but I’d like you to check back in with me tomorrow.”

Leonard frowned. “I can get back to work. There was enough to do before and now I have two bodies to check over.”

“Take the time off Bones, I’ll take you off duty until Beta shift tomorrow.”

He opened his mouth to protest, but Jim cut him off before he could utter a word.

“No. Just, take it easy until we can be sure there’s not going to be any repercussions from this. I’m not going to take that PADD off you, I know you better than that, but you’re looking into this from our quarters.”

Leonard eyed the PADD in his hand, and nodded once, knowing when to fight Jim and when to salute and to ask how high to jump. He turned his gaze to M’Benga, who shrugged and gestured to the door. “Nothing I need to keep you here for. Just let me know if anything doesn’t feel right.”

“You got it. Thanks.”

M’Benga smiled and nodded. “Glad to have you back with us.”

Leonard straightened his uniform before stepping out into his sickbay, fully aware of Jim on his heels. He paused to respond to well-wishes from his staff until he felt Jim start to shift behind him. The walk to their quarters was made in silence, just the brush of Jim’s arm against his as they walked in step with each other. He stopped just inside their doorway, feeling the air stir the hair at the nape of his neck as the door slid shut behind him. He breathed in the familiar smells as they wrapped around him, settled him. He’d woken here only this morning but it seemed so long ago.

He jumped when one of Jim’s hands settled low on his back. He hadn’t even been aware he’d closed his eyes, but when he blinked them open it was to Jim’s concerned face. His mind was trying to wrap around the fact that he was still alive and not dead. The latter he could accept. It was a fact of life itself, and if his last thoughts before the lights went out could be trusted, then he was convinced he was dying and there would be no waking up from it. Yet he did wake up, and he was struggling to comprehend that.

He didn’t know if those thoughts showed on his face, but Jim’s features twisted into a pained grimace and he had no idea which of them moved first, but Jim’s face was suddenly pressing into his neck, his hands clawing at the shirt on his back until he found a position where he could hold on tight. McCoy wrapped his arms around the slender body in return, and feeling the faint tremors he tightened his hold. He buried his nose in Jim’s hair and inhaled a heady mix of sweat, Jim’s cologne, and the faint trace of the material of the environmental suit he’d worn earlier.

Jim breathed in a deep shaky breath before his grip loosened and he pulled back. When Jim averted his gaze, Leonard caught his wrist before he could retreat too far. “You okay?”

Jim’s snort was part disbelief and part anger, and Leonard couldn’t stop the frown from creasing his forehead. “Should be asking you that, but yeah I’m fine. Tired and weirded out but that seems to be situation normal at the moment.” Jim licked his bottom lip as he paused. It was when his posture tensed that Leonard knew Jim was retreating behind his walls, putting on his game-face. “Look, I’m going to take a shower before I go debrief Spock and give him a break from the Bridge. I guess you’ll want to take a look at those reports.” He nodded at the PADD that Leonard still held.

Leonard’s gaze drifted to the PADD before he turned back to Jim, nodding once and trying not to let any of his hurt at Jim’s sudden mood swing show. Jim smiled briefly, a gesture that didn’t spread beyond his lips before turning towards the bathroom. Leonard watched as he started stripping his shirts off before the door closed against the sight. He sighed and walked over to the couch, dropping down into the soft cushions he let his head tip back and stared at the ceiling. Thoughts interchanged and flitted so quickly, and his head ached trying to grasp onto something that wasn’t fucked up or felt like it was slipping through his fingers. He knew Jim needed to debrief his First Officer, knew that slipping back into what was safe and normal would be Jim’s way of coping, but he couldn’t help the swell of hurt that came with Jim turning his back. And to top it all off, Leonard knew he should be glad he was alive, but he couldn’t get there without finding out what went wrong and why those people had died. Why them and not him?

He dropped his head as the bathroom door slid open, Jim’s gaze holding his as he walked past to the bedroom, his lower half wrapped in a towel. Leonard pushed down the urge to follow, waiting for the bang of drawers and rustling of fabric to stop before he spoke. “Can you see about sending me the readings from the biosensors?” He kept his voice quiet, toneless, and he swore he could hear Jim’s sharp intake of breath before he appeared in the opening, gold command shirt in his hands.

“I’ll get Spock to send it to the PADD,” he said, before slipping the command shirt on. He retrieved his boots from the bathroom, stepping into them in silence, and Leonard was convinced he was going to leave their quarters without another word, until he paused in the open doorway. “Bones?”

Leonard lifted his head. “Yeah?”

“I’m glad you’re okay.”

Leonard smiled slightly at the hushed words. “Me too.”

Jim nodded and turned his gaze to the corridor in front of him. “Just see if you can work out what the hell happened.” He didn’t wait for a reply before stepping out into the corridor, the door closing behind him left only silence and a sense of loss.

Leonard suddenly felt claustrophobic. He huffed out a breath and switched on the PADD, the light of the display kick-started the warning twinges of an oncoming headache. He ignored it. It was just another thing that could be chalked up to what was ‘normal’, and he’d take as much of that as he could get.


	4. Chapter 4

*******

 

The planet was warm, the sky colored with light that was closer to red than yellow. Pink hues spread over a jagged mountainous surface that was softened by carpets of grasses that shifted on the wind in waves of ever-changing shades of green. Amidst the grasses towered ancient trees, their huge trunks sitting like sentinels, their branches splitting outwards and upwards so that their thick canopies sheltered the ground below and cast it into perpetual darkness.

Bursts of bright colors huddled together as far as the eye could see, their fruits borne from careful labor of the race that tended to them. The Nidri cared little for technology, what little they had bothered to develop went into creating buildings, the resources they needed, and ways to keep their planet how they wanted it. Leonard’s first impression was that it looked idyllic, but there was a swell of familiarity that he couldn’t quite place, and something lying beneath it all that left him unsettled.

The Nidri were humanoid, yet taller and more slender, towering above Leonard like their trees shadowed the land. Their skin was pale and practically iridescent, like mother of pearl, and it was smooth and hairless, delicate enough to show each minutia of bone structure. Facial features were limited to wide black eyes that didn’t blink.

It was the way the Nidri would dip their heads as he navigated the simple pathways of their villages that unnerved him. The whispers followed him, but he could never catch enough of to know what they were saying. It left him checking back over his shoulder so frequently that on one occasion when he turned forward again he had practically walked into one of them. There was no dip to their head beyond what was needed to look down at him. Leonard opened his mouth to ask, only to be interrupted by Jim’s voice.

His eyes blinked open to their quarters on the _Enterprise_ , to Jim’s frowning face and a dull ache behind his eyes.

“You okay?”

Jim’s voice was rough with exhaustion, and Leonard blinked again as he straightened up on the couch from where he clearly had dropped off, the remnants of the dream fading to the back of his mind. “Yeah, what time is it?” He cleared his throat when the words tripped off his tongue like gravel, one hand scrubbed at his eyes as the other plucked the PADD from where it was hanging on the edge of the couch cushions, its screen long since powered down to sleep mode.

“Nearly 0800.”

Leonard frowned, calculating that he must have slept the night away on the couch, completely missing Jim’s return. “You just get in?”

Jim shrugged and stepped back to let Leonard stand. “I sent engineering teams back down to the station, this time with open comms. I needed some answers.”

Leonard scratched an itch under the collar of his shirt. “Dammit Jim,” he sighed.

“Look, I know what you want to say but please, just don’t. I need to know what happened to you before I can turn my back on this place. If you can tell me you know, if you can tell me that something in those files M’Benga gave you have given you some evidence of something, anything, then tell me now.”

Leonard didn’t know if Jim’s vehemence was a product of lack of sleep or a desperate need to find his answer. He eyed the PADD on the low table by the couch before turning back to Jim. “I can’t give you a why. I can barely give you a how that doesn’t involve taking great leaps in scientific theory.”

“Then let me deal with this how I need to.” Jim’s hands were now resting on his hips, his knuckles turning white under the strain of keeping himself in check.

Leonard ran a hand through his hair and tried to choose his words carefully. “Jim…”

“Bones, the nearest ship to take over is five days away. If we haven’t got anything by the time the _Excalibur_ arrives I’ll let it go. I’m not sitting up here waiting for something else to happen, or handing over a shitload of trouble because we were too tired to do anything. Just let me handle it.”

Leonard knew Jim’s way of handling things was all or nothing. ‘Nothing’ wouldn’t sit well with him, but his ‘all’ was the last thing they needed after all the months they’d just worked through. Busy would keep Jim from dwelling on things, and ever since they got out of the isolation booth in sickbay Jim had been even more distant, if that had even been possible. Leonard would take those five days, let Jim work through whatever he had to, and then they were talking this out. As long as those five days didn't end the same way as his last promise had. For now he nodded. “I’m going to grab some food and check in with M’Benga. Figure I might as well work from there.”

He knew Jim had signed him off until Beta shift but he was mentally daring him to say something after coming in from an all-nighter. But Jim just breathed out and nodded sharply. “Let me know what he says.”

He opened his mouth to say something, anything, to break the strange distance they were putting between them. He thought about asking if Jim would join him for breakfast but he wasn’t sure if he could stand the strain for the length of time it would take to choke his food down. He nodded, before heading into the sleeping area to grab a change of clothes.

By the time he came out of the bathroom the lights were dimmed. Leonard paused before he got close enough to trigger the doors to the corridor, warring with himself as to whether he should walk the distance to check on Jim, whether he should leave himself with that image for the rest of the day rather than their conversation. He tore his eyes away from the darkened sleeping area and shoved a hand through his freshly washed hair. The door hissed shut behind him as hit the corridor.

Leonard paused long enough in the mess to grab some toast and coffee, risking a bout of indigestion by eating it on route to sickbay. If M’Benga had expected him to stay out of there until later he didn’t show it when Leonard walked into sickbay brushing the last crumbs of toast from his blue shirt. While Leonard permitted M’Benga to run his own scans their conversation was limited to what Leonard had missed during the away mission and subsequent fallout; the usual suspects of silly accidents and requests for analgesics.

“Well,” M’Benga started as he handed Leonard the PADD. “Looks like whatever jolt you took is still sorting itself out. Cell numbers are still creeping upwards, that’s hardly something to worry about I guess, but then you’re the neuroscientist so perhaps you can find an explanation for it. How are you feeling?”

Leonard shrugged as he skimmed the readouts scrolling along the screen of the PADD. “Just like the rest of the crew, I could do with some shore leave and something to get rid of a headache. It’s nothing different to how I felt when I left the ship yesterday.”

M’Benga didn’t reply straight away, and Leonard could tell from the way he shifted that he wanted to ask something. “You going to spit it out?” he asked as he slipped from the biobed.

M’Benga waited until he finished straightening his shirts before saying anything, and when he did his voice was low. “I know you’ve probably seen the autopsy results by now, made your own conclusions, so I guess you don’t need me to point out that the cell regeneration is in the same area of the brain as was enlarged in Dorsey.”

Leonard frowned. “You’d guess right.”

“I’ll need to put that in the report, along with a recommendation that it’s monitored. If you’ve been exposed to the same agent that Dorsey was…”

His voice trailed off as though he was asking something he was sure Leonard would not agree to. Leonard leaned back against the biobed and crossed his arms. “Geoff, you write what you need to, and if you think this is something that needs monitoring under the circumstances, then you put that down too. I’ve never asked my staff to make omissions or falsify records, nor will I start now whether it’s for what you perceive to be my benefit or not. However, I can handle the scans myself unless you feel that I’m not best placed to do so.”

M’Benga held up a placating hand and shook his head. “I wouldn’t dream of it. I think you’re far more qualified to work out what’s going on in your head, I just hope you’ll talk to me if you need to. Or at the very least the Captain.”

Leonard patted M’Benga’s arm when he paused alongside him. “Feel free to keep an eye on my records for the results. I’m not going to keep anything out of them. If I need to talk to someone, I’ll do so.” Although Leonard wasn’t sure that was the case, certainly not with Jim.

He stepped around M’Benga and walked into his office, easing himself down into his chair with all the grace of an octogenarian. He was feeling old, feeling the strain from a string of difficult missions and lack of downtime. He glanced again at the scans M’Benga had just made, eyeing the rates of cell regeneration, and mentally calculating whether that would equate to the level of enlargement in Dorsey’s own brain in the time since the accident. While there was some correlation, the rates of growth weren’t comparable, but that didn’t mean that the rate of change would remain linear. The PADD clattered when it hit his desk.

He had a comm to make to Jim, and the longer he put it off, the harder it was going to be to make Jim believe he was fine… that he wasn’t freaking out. Because the last thing that Jim needed while on his crusade for what had gone off, was to worry about what might or might not still happen. He picked up the PADD again, wrote the barest of summaries for the scans, omitting anything that would give Jim cause to worry, and hit send before he could change his mind. Hopefully Jim would still be asleep and Leonard would have more time to think of a response should Jim ask the wrong question.

It was only a few hours later when Jim sent a reply, Leonard was somewhere in the middle of writing his report when his PADD sounded. Jim’s response was short and tagged with his own brief one-liner of how he was heading dirt-side and would see him later, and signed off with a brief sorry about earlier. Leonard crossed off avoidance on his mental list of how things were going downhill between them, a textual countdown to the final line on his list of _it’s over_.

He was in the final stages of the report into what had happened in _Oresme_ , his fingers tapping on his desk as he ran sentences and phrases through his mind, trying to find some easy way to summarize the whole damn mess, when the comm from the bridge came through. One of the sections they were shoring up had collapsed and as a result multiple casualties were due in. Leonard stood up abruptly, his mind awash with a range of feelings, panic and preparation, anger and hurt.

When Leonard stepped out of his office he caught the backs of his med team as they disappeared through the door heading to the transporter room. He grabbed up one of the tricorders and waited for the readings to come through from the portable units the nurses were carrying. It didn’t take long before the information started scrolling across his screen and he released a relieved breath when the names stopped after only three, none of them Jim, and the injuries were no worse than a few minor cuts and a broken arm.

Time passed by in a flurry of activity, of regenerators and hyposprays, and in barked orders and softer reassurances. He’d signed out his last patient when he finally got back to his office to make his report to the bridge. With Spock all assured and updated he spared a glance at the chrono. With almost two and a half shifts under his belt since he first made an appearance, he figured now was as good as any time to call it a day.

He hadn’t expected Jim to be there when he walked in, but he was sitting on the sofa leaning forward over a pile of PADD’s on the table in front of him. He had a hand rubbing small circles on his shoulder, and Leonard could tell by the stiffness in his posture that he was hurting. He looked up when Leonard entered, a brief smile of greeting and a soft ‘hey’ before his attention was back on the PADD in his hand.

“You okay?” Leonard asked. He toyed with himself on whether to interrupt, but sat himself down gingerly on the side where Jim was hurting.

Jim shrugged his good shoulder but didn’t look up. “Just wrenched it a little trying to get at the engineers that got caught in the collapse.”

“Well, they’re all okay and back in their quarters raring to go for tomorrow. You want me to take a look?”

“It’s okay,” Jim muttered.

Leonard huffed and tried to rein in his temper. He was tired of walking on eggshells around Jim but based on the way they’d been going of late he knew that his usual bitching would be met by resistance rather than the usual amused acceptance. He lifted Jim’s hand from his shoulder and replaced it with his own. Underneath the two shirts he could feel the warmth of inflammation, and the tightness in the muscle that wrapped around the bone. Jim shifted, but Leonard quieted him with the tightening of his hand. “Just let me do this, you don’t even have to tear yourself away from your work.”

Jim’s tense frame relaxed a little, and Leonard took that as his acquiescence. His fingers trailed along his shoulder looking for the knots and strain within the muscles, easily finding the source of the pain in the infraspinatus and the trapezius. He let his mind drift to what his hands were doing, massaging and loosening, soothing away each knot, focusing on each overly warm area. He had no idea how long he’d sat there, but the only thing pulling him back out to the present was Jim’s hand on top of his, stilling his movements. He blinked the room back into focus, and Jim’s hand slid away when he made eye contact.

There was a grateful smile on Jim’s face for a brief moment. “It’s good. Those healing hands of yours have worked their usual magic, can’t feel a thing.”

Leonard nodded, reaching back out to run a hand back over Jim’s shoulder, the heat and tightness now gone. He couldn’t bite back the yawn, nor the tears that it brought to his eyes.

Jim’s hand patted his thigh. “You go hit the sack, I’ll be through in a minute, just need to finish this off.”

All he could do was nod and drag his suddenly exhausted body to the bedroom. He left his clothes in a pile at his feet and crawled under the covers, failing to bite back the sigh of relief that slipped out as he nestled into the pillow. Jim’s side of the bed was still cold when sleep overtook him.


	5. Chapter 5

*******

 

Leonard stared at the PADD for a long moment before he hit the button to send the results of the scans to his medical file. He’d told M’Benga he’d keep them updated, and he supposed that M’Benga could make his own mind up should he decide to go look, it wasn’t that he was hiding anything as much as not openly discussing it. He’d had the same dream again last night, so similar to the first that he’d thought of it as an action replay, but things weren’t exactly the same. There were little differences that spoke of the same routines on a different day. Those same routines he could understand when his eyes blinked open to a half-empty bed and throbbing headache. He’d rolled out of bed with the added bonus of a stiff shoulder and the distinct feeling that he was getting old way too fast. The results of the scans he ran didn’t really raise his hopes of all this going away. Everything indicated he was heading the same way as Dorsey, if what little they had to go on was right.

He wondered when or if he’d start to feel what Dorsey felt, whether he’d know it when it started. Using the time between the explosion and the first death as a guide, Leonard figured he had a day or two before everything went to hell, if he was destined to head down the same path. He wasn’t hearing voices… yet. He wasn’t sure he would be able to deal with that, ignorance was his way of coping with the crew’s troubles, his faith was in his training and instinct, and the odd piece of technology to ease the way. Hearing someone’s thoughts was an invasion of trust, and Leonard knew nothing about how to keep them out. Should he be worrying about this when he had nothing to show for it except a bunch of readings on a chart?

Leonard sighed and pressed his thumb to the arch of his eyebrow, trying to push away the pain. The briefing they’d had earlier that morning had revealed little in the way of progress. Scotty’s report of the structural integrity of _Oresme_ made everyone uneasy. The epicenter of the explosion was completely enclosed by fallen debris, and Scotty couldn’t be certain that whatever element had caused the explosion in the first place wasn’t still leaking out until he could get close enough to it, and that was being hampered by having to work in environmental suits. They were doing their best to neutralize each chemical they identified, and the environmental readings were getting better, but the anti-grav lifts could only shift so much metal and no matter how quickly they wanted to work, they were just going to have to take it easy.

Leonard’s own report held little cheer, and the feeling of helplessness seemed to spread around the table. Dorsey’s body held few clues as to the manner of his death. Blood vessels were clogged, organs deteriorated, and if Dorsey had been 100 years old Leonard would have signed it off as a body that failed due to age, not someone who had been barely 30 only a minute or two earlier. He explained the psionic abilities away due to the expansion within Dorsey’s brain, but finding a reason for what triggered the cell generation was beyond him, his only explanation being something within the _Oresme’s_ experiments. He didn’t bring up the regeneration that was still happening within his own head, but he saw Jim’s posture tense up when he spoke about Dorsey. At the end of the briefing he hadn’t waited around to see what Jim’s reaction would be without the eyes and ears of his senior officers around him, and if anyone commented on the CMO’s unusually rapid departure, he didn’t hear it.

Within the walls of his office he could pretend the world outside of it wasn’t fracturing. When Jocelyn had walked out he’d barely noticed there had been anything wrong. With Jim each moment they didn’t talk, each time they turned and walked away from the other, it felt like another twist in his gut. He wondered if that was what Jocelyn had felt when he’d slept in his office or when another dinner was swept into the recycler. He felt like he was swimming up current, wondered if it was time to finally tell her he understood. Leonard shook his head. The past was just that, and he needed to look at the present and close the cavern between them before it got any wider, he’d made a promise to fix this, not let it fester or make it goddamn worse.

He rubbed a hand over his face and reached for the cup of coffee, swallowing the tepid liquid with a grimace. His comm pinged with a message and he eyed it wearily in the pointless hope that it would go away. He needed more coffee. Before he had the chance to even think about reaching out for his comm or trailing to the replicator, Chapel’s voice broke into his self-imposed silence calling him out into sickbay. There was no urgency in her voice, so he allowed himself a moment to close his eyes and breathe deep.

He stepped out into the main treatment area, spotting Chapel in conversation with a young ensign perched on the edge of a biobed. Leonard’s mind was diagnosing as he stepped up to them: a sheen of sweat on his patient’s brow, his posture slightly curled in on himself, one hand to his side. It would be a fairly obvious guess to say where the trouble was, a tricorder would dig down under the skin to tell him exactly what was wrong, but Leonard knew without any hesitation. He knew from the inflammation, the stilted blood flow, from the pain radiating out on the right side. He bit the inside of his lip in a bid to keep his diagnosis quiet, and wordlessly held out his hand for the tricorder in Chapel’s hand. He forced himself to make note of each reading, to make sure he wasn’t just plucking nonsense from nowhere, but everything he’d sensed was there in front of him.

He pushed the implications of that to the back of his mind. Pressed it back until he could concentrate on what he needed to do, keeping his patient calm and his hand steady while he removed his appendix. Surgery, fixing people, that was second-nature to him, the routine of standard processes and practices. It was when the surgery was all over, when Ensign Wallins was settled in a biobed sleeping off the anesthesia, and when the last dot had been placed at the end of Wallins’ updated records, Leonard found those implications creeping back into the forefront again.

He tried to tell himself that it was experience, that any half-rate doctor started diagnosing on sight, everything from posture to pallor, pupils and pinched features. And he could justify that to a certain extent, but before he got that tricorder in his hands it should have been a visual outward appraisal. He’d known. He’d seen the appendicitis for exactly what it was, and when he’d cut into Wallins’ skin with the laser scalpel the exact image that had been in his mind was laid out before him.

He sighed deeply and scrubbed a hand over his face, blinking to bring his desk back into focus. He reached for the PADD and closed down Wallins’ file. As he moved to place the PADD somewhere where he’d remember to put it back in the main medbay, a wave of dizziness dimmed the edges of his vision making it contract to a single point. For a moment all he could hope was that he wasn’t about to hit the deck in his own sickbay. His fingers lost their grip momentarily on the PADD and he reached out to grab it again, the back of his hand colliding with the corner of his desk enough to scrape skin and bruise.

The PADD clattered to the floor regardless, the sound mingling with his muttered curses. He stared at it until he was sure that bending down to retrieve it wouldn’t end up with his face meeting the deck, but the blackness that threatened his vision faded away leaving him blinking at the floor.

The sudden onset of the dizzy spell and its lack of triggering movement had him running a mental assessment on himself, but he couldn’t detect anything out of the ordinary. His gaze jumped to the tricorder sitting on the end of his desk, as he realized what was going on in his head was far from normal. Reaching out for the tricorder, his eyes caught on the abraded skin on the back of his hand, and he paused. He picked off the thin wisps of skin, ignoring the sting as he swept his thumb over the tackiness of the scrape and the rapidly forming bruise underneath it.

His concept shifted until it was as if he was staring at his hand under a microscope. He could see the tears in the thin dermal layers, all ragged edges and gaping chasms, lakes of blood that he knew in reality were nothing but pinpricks. Underneath it all he could see blood flowing sluggishly from capillaries split open under the blow they’d taken, the fallout reminiscent of an explosion.

It seemed so easy then to imagine the blood flow stopping. When he looked back later, he couldn’t say if he did it through instinct or curiosity, whether the clinical side of his mind responded to the ‘fix-it’ mentality of being a doctor or whether whatever the hell was going on in his head had a built-in response mode, but the blood stopped. As his thumb continued to rub gentle circles he thought about the motion, about erasing what was there. He startled when he felt the first of the tears starting to knit, split capillaries joining back together with a tug and sting. He blinked until his focus wasn’t so magnified, and stared at the back of his hand as the sting dialed back to pinpricks, like the tingle from a cramp as blood retuned to flowing correctly. The black swell of the bruise dissipated as he watched it, skin smoothing until there was nothing there, not even a redness.

He flexed his fingers, the roll of small bones in his hand rising and falling like piano keys. Nothing marred the tanned skin, and there were no twinges to indicate that anything was ever there. This time he didn’t pause when he reached out for the tricorder, his foot tapping impatiently as the kit fired up. He started with his hand, but no matter how he tweaked the sensors they showed nothing. His foot stopped tapping as he fiddled with the settings, until there was nothing else to toggle, and then he stilled. This went beyond just knowing where someone hurt. This came with the ability to heal, or at least it did with himself. This was the kind of power that Dorsey had misused, and Dorsey showed that it didn’t stop there, because he got into people’s heads, enough that he could halt someone in their tracks. Leonard’s fingers tensed around the sensor.

The chrono on the wall flicked on another minute and Leonard blinked at it, finding himself having lost over an hour to whatever his body and mind had been doing. It had been four hours since he last carried out this scan. He forced himself not to think about the implications as the tricorder logged its readings. The screen stared back at him, facts and figures he couldn’t ignore or dispute, just as he couldn’t deny the presence and then repair of the bruise on the back of his hand. Whatever was going on was getting worse, accelerating quicker than he’d thought, and that couple of days he’d estimated only a few hours before was looking optimistic. He glanced at the PADD where it still lay on the floor, before bolting from his office, and from sickbay.

If he had to admit to himself why he pressed the buzzer at Spock’s door then he’d be lying if he said it was anything other than fear. Fear of what was happening, and fear of what was likely to happen. The only emotion that Spock showed when Leonard asked if he could come in was a raised eyebrow as he stepped to the side to allow Leonard to enter.

Spock’s quarters were as prim and proper as the man himself, each piece of fabric pressed flat and pristine so that Leonard didn’t know where to sit. Spock indicated a couch that looked more like a bench than somewhere to kick back, but Leonard took it anyway perching himself stiffly on one end. Spock seated himself in an equally uninviting chair across from him, his fingers steepled in front of him as he rested his elbows on the chair arms.

“What may I assist you with?”

Leonard sighed, warring with himself as to whether this was a good idea. His wandering gaze fell on the back of his hand, and he began to speak. “I still haven’t got an answer as to what killed Kenton Dorsey, or even how he got his abilities, but I don’t think they appeared all at once. I think they developed until he couldn’t deal with them any longer. I can only guess as to what the sudden onset of telepathy or empathy would be like for a human. I wanted to ask you about it.”

Spock folded his hands on his lap. “From what I have ascertained from your report, you believed Dr Dorsey was capable of openly reading your thoughts as well as communicating directly within your mind. He was also capable of controlling your movements and inflicting physical injury without touch.”

Leonard nodded, trying not to let his thoughts drift back. “He seemed to be able to do it with ease. I got the impression that whatever he was going through drove him to kill in order to silence maybe. Either that or to end whatever he could feel or hear. I wanted to know what it would be like, and how someone would deal with it.”

It was the latter that he was trying to get an answer to, some way to know how to deal with what could be waiting for him when he woke up in the morning. Spock inclined his head. “Most psionic races are taught from infancy how to adapt to the onset of their abilities. Sudden onset without such conditioning would prove to be a challenge few races could adapt to. With telepathic powers the need is there for an individual to shut out voices and thoughts in order to gain quiet. I believe for a full telepath the noise of thousands of voices is considerably intrusive and painful, and without effective shields they can only survive with sedatives and painkillers which ultimately fail to be sufficient. Very few survive long without shields.”

Leonard swallowed. “So, Dorsey survived longer because he only had the small number of station personnel to cope with.”

“So I would surmise.”

He cast his mind back to what Dorsey had said about his victims not being in pain anymore, their grief or stress wearing him down even with the smaller numbers until he could no longer cope. “He couldn’t cope with what he had to deal with,” Leonard said softly. Trying not to even think about how a full complement of crew would sound, he hoped he wouldn’t find out.

“Mental shields are vital for psi-races. I myself am merely a touch telepath, my training was focused on maintaining control within a meld, however we must also maintain shields when living with humans. Your tendency towards casual contact can often come unexpectedly.”

Leonard snorted, thinking of Jim’s habit of reaching out a hand to a shoulder, the small of your back. He wondered if that touch he knew so intimately would become too much for him. “So how do you create your shields?”

Spock was a quiet a moment, and Leonard wondered if he was calculating the reasons why Leonard would ask that question, whether for curiosity or from a medical standpoint. He didn’t really care what Spock thought, but he hoped there would be enough trust for him to speak, because he needed to hear the answer.

“Constant shields come from much practice,” he eventually said. “One should imagine an impenetrable wall around your mind. I believe creating transparent energy shields works sufficiently for many telepaths in that they can see outward, reaching beyond their shields should they need to, yet nothing can pass through from the outside. However, when those walls are breached and collapse I have adopted the method of rebuilding a wall brick by brick, layer upon layer. The concentration involved in the process helps to alleviate the sensory input still coming from outside until such walls can be completed.”

“Bricks and mortar, huh?” Leonard mused, trying to build up a wall in his head around his mind. He couldn’t see the boundaries where he should be building, and nothing was coming at him so he had no idea whether he was succeeding or leaving holes big enough to pilot a shuttle through. He gave up when he realized Spock had gone quiet. He coughed and sat up straighter. “I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me about this,” he said quietly.

“You are welcome, doctor. I trust the information will prove to be of use in your investigation.”

Leonard stood, thankful to be off the couch and anywhere but here. The conversation had proven to have gone better than he expected, yet he couldn’t help but feel worse. He might have a method to try to keep the voices out should that develop, but if telepathic races couldn’t cope without shields he doubted he’d cope with it for long. “I hope so too.”

The corridor outside Spock’s quarters felt cold and alien after the heat within, and Leonard stood there a moment. He nodded at a crewmember that passed him, his gaze following the man down the corridor as he tried to listen for a wayward thought. Everything stayed quiet over the sounds of the ship, but Leonard had a feeling it wouldn’t last for long.

He turned on his heel away from the officer’s deck, his feet taking him further from his usual haunts until he found himself on the deserted observation deck staring out of a viewport. Below him Bragan IV filled most of the window, its surfaces a mix of greens and blues so in contrast to the dead planet they encountered when they beamed down. He eased himself down into one of chairs when cramp shot through his foot. Somehow he knew it wasn’t his. Somewhere on a deck below him someone had been sitting funny, the blood flow restricted until they finally felt the need to move. He tried to push it away, his toes wriggling in his boot until the pins and needles finally left.

He couldn’t stop himself reaching out then, looking for the aches and pains of a crew working at its limits. A Lieutenant on Deck 6 got a paper-cut from her old-fashioned paper notebook, and he winced as he felt the skin split. There was nothing on his own finger when he looked and he wiped it against his pants leg to take away the sting. He stopped cataloging the time passing in minutes and hours; instead it came down to the change in the landscape out of the window as the planet rotated and each stubbed toe or bout of indigestion. He no longer knew if the headache was his, or the culmination of a crew desperately looking for their rest.

He thought about what Spock had said; about instinct, and about years of training in adolescence in order to protect a mind. He thought about those shields he should try building, starting with a single brick. They didn’t stay steady for long before something tumbled them down, and when he imagined a solid shield there was always something just there that he couldn’t quite shut out. He barely noticed anyone who came and went in the room, none of them came looking for him, least of all Jim.


	6. Chapter 6

*******

 

Leonard spent the following day in their quarters, trying to hide away from people and their complaints, trying to hide from Jim too if he was being honest with himself. By the time he’d finally torn himself away from the observation deck their quarters were empty, Jim’s side of the bed was lukewarm and at least showing signs of occupation, even if Jim wasn’t anywhere to be found.

He’d left Chapel with instructions to contact him as normal; he knew he could be in sickbay in under a minute, less time than it would take to get there from the transporter room if an emergency came in. He had done his daily scan, the results even less appealing than he’d expected, and he wondered if there was some correlation between the rates of advancement and the effects he was noticing develop. He stabbed a finger at his PADD to add the data to his medical file. He wasn’t sure if he wanted M’Benga to pry or not, couldn’t decide if he wanted his comm to chime and M’Benga’s name to show because then he’d have to face up to what was happening.

But there was no comm, and nothing that required his attention to interrupt his solitude. He forced himself to attack as much of his backlogged work as he could, but his concentration wavered and he kept pulling back up Dorsey’s autopsy report and his memories of what had happened in _Oresme_ ’s medbay. His eyes strayed every so often to where the bruise should have colored the back of his hand, until that was all he could see. The longer he stared at it, the easier it was to sense each tiny detail of his anatomy. It started with his hand but as his eyes trailed up his clothed arm he could just as easily sense each sinew of muscle and marrow of bone. His knowledge base told him what should be there, in his mind though he knew exactly where each vein and artery ran.

He could see the faint jagged line in his left radius where the regenerator had healed the break from when he fell out of a tree in Tom Buford’s back yard. That particular injury he knew would be visible, but there shouldn’t have been any evidence for the bloody gash the Bortan spear had left in his side a year ago. He could see the difference in the skin, new next to old, could see where each layer of dermis had been knitted against its neighbor, joining slashed capillaries and nerve fibers. For a doctor it was exhilarating, but this was something he was not meant to see, not without the aid of technology.

He turned his attention to the source of all this, to that section deep within his brain that was growing. He could see the damage the expansion in his brain was causing to the surrounding areas, but as he focused on it, he could see that damage being airbrushed away only to burst up again in a different place a moment later. If he concentrated enough he could feel each new cell appear, pinprick flashes of bright white pain he couldn’t foresee in order to stop them from happening. He tried to press back, tried to suppress whatever mechanisms were operating but he could feel those bursts of pain coming quicker, more of them at once. He backed off then, easing pain receptors in the hope that he could block out what was happening, trying to dial back the effect.

Dorsey’s voice filtered into his thoughts and the awe and desperation Leonard had detected in his words suddenly made sense. Dorsey couldn’t stop this, no more than Leonard was able to, but as a doctor… He took a deep breath trying to push past the memories of phantom hands pressing in, crushing. He used his new senses to try to find the fingerprints he knew must have been pressed into his lungs by Dorsey’s hand, but there was nothing there. There were no signs of old bruising or trauma like there was with the old wounds and breaks, nothing but unmarred surfaces. Nothing but a heart beating a little too fast in his panic, pulses of blood racing through his system, oxygen being absorbed in lungs inflating and deflating as they kept up with his gasps for air. It was a rhythm he could follow, enclose himself in to ignore those pinpricks of pain.

He was so focused on that rhythm that he barely felt the nerves in his cheek responding to something. But it was enough to break him out of his daze, enough to investigate. When it came again he was ready for the sting, ready to assess the ripple in the dermal layers. It was only when he looked for a source that he heard Jim’s voice.

He sucked in a deep breath, his eyes flickering open to Jim’s panic. He felt raw, each nerve-ending sending signals that he could feel race along each nerve fiber to his brain. He tried to turn it down, tried to bring his focus from within back to his surroundings, to the feel of Jim’s skin against his cheek.

“Jesus Bones, what happened?”

Leonard blinked as he registered where he was, the unforgiving floor beneath his knees, the wall against his back. He grunted as he shifted, bringing his cramping legs out from under him as he sat back down again. Jim had moved back a little to allow him to move, but settled again in front of him, the back of Jim’s hand pressing to Leonard’s forehead while he found his voice. Leonard knew he wouldn’t find a fever there, but allowed the gesture all the same.

“I’m okay.”

Jim’s hand slipped away, but Leonard caught it before he could move too far away, using the touch to ground himself. The calluses and slightly too dry skin felt good against his own fingers and Leonard held on tight.

“No you’re not. You didn’t show any response at all when I walked in, and you didn’t come round straightaway. What’s going on?”

He glanced away from Jim’s concerned face and surveyed the room, his eyes stopping on the chrono on the opposite wall. He couldn’t say how, why, or when he moved from the couch, or how he lost track of time or himself so badly.

“Bones?”

Jim’s voice brought his attention back to him. He blinked again, feeling raw and exposed, and like everything was covered in a shroud. He dropped his eyes to their joined hands, raising Jim’s hand to stare at the scar on the pad of Jim’s thumb that he’d got when rock climbing once. Jim had been too far from his first aid kit and not really all that inclined to seek it out for a small cut when he still had a cliff face to finish climbing. He’d never thought about getting it sealed properly or a regenerator to take away the silvery line. Jim had told him the tale one lazy morning as Leonard had nipped, licked and sucked at the offending scar, listening to Jim’s voice change under his ministrations.

Running his thumb along the scar now he could see the way the shard of rock had sliced through the dermal layers, how Jim’s inattention as he completed his climb had kept the blood flowing, stopping it from congealing straightaway, the split skin not knitting. Leonard didn’t stop to think as he smoothed out the ragged edges, melded skin back together, this time without the gaps or the scar tissue. He smoothed his thumb over Jim’s until the silvery scar tissue faded away and the whorls of his fingerprint were again sharp and uninterrupted under his touch.

Jim’s hand twitched and Leonard let him take it back this time, watching in silence as Jim inspected the repaired skin. He looked up sharply, his mouth parted on unspoken words.

“I can see everything,” Leonard started. “From the way blood flows through each vein, to old injuries and scars that tricorders wouldn’t be able to see, even the ones I can’t remember getting as a kid. Apparently I must have messed with one of the barn cats if the claw marks are anything to go by.”

“And that?” Jim asked, holding up his thumb.

Leonard’s gaze flicked from his thumb to Jim’s face, and back again. “I could see where the damage was, it’s just a case of thinking about it, see all the irregularities on a cellular level and smoothing them out.”

“And this has come from where? Hell, even when? Is this why you didn’t come back to our quarters last night?”

“It has to have come from whatever happened at the _Oresme_ station. Something triggered that cell regeneration and it hasn’t stopped yet. That’s when and where, although everything seems to be developing bit by bit. I just felt I could do it, patch things up. I didn’t really know last night, I just needed to make sense of it of what I felt.”

Jim was silent for a long while, and when he spoke his voice was flat and authoritative. “I want you down in sickbay.”

Leonard sighed and sagged tiredly against the wall. “There’s nothing to see Jim, nothing to fix and nothing to stop this.”

“Then humor me,” Jim said, his voice determined.

Leonard closed his eyes and sighed. “So they can tell me something I already know?”

“Well maybe they can actually tell _me_ something I don’t know, which is apparently everything. Why didn’t you tell me about all this? And don’t you dare try to turn it on me and say I had enough to worry about.” Jim’s hand had started to wave as he began speaking, but his final accusation came with a defiant point.

Leonard remained silent, his eyes fixed on the pad of his own thumb, his index finger following a tingling line in the exact place as the one that had been on Jim’s thumb. Jim knew what he had said was the truth, he just didn’t need Leonard to voice it, even if his silence was doing the talking for him.

“I don’t want to become him,” Leonard whispered, breaking the silence, even if his gaze never wavered from the tip of his thumb. “I can’t think about what he did to those people, because I’m beginning to see how he’d be driven to it.”

With a sigh Jim sat down next to him against the wall, Jim's shoulder pressed to his. “You’re not him,” he said softly. “You’ll never be a killer, not like that.”

Leonard tipped his head back to rest against the wall, taking comfort from the warmth that came with Jim’s touch. “What if they said the same thing about him?”

“You’re not going to become that. I won’t let you. We’ll handle this together, but you’re going to have to talk to me, you can’t keep this to yourself.”

“As my Captain or my partner?” McCoy muttered, regretting it as soon as he felt Jim stiffen next to him. He straightened up, and placed his hand on Jim’s thigh. “Shit, sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Then what did you mean it like?” Jim shook off his hand and stood up, putting some distance between them. “It’s not like you’ve been talking to me on any level until now.”

“I didn’t mean anything by it,” he started, a tinge of desperation into his words. “I know you need to know as the Captain of this ship, I accept that and I agree with it. If I end up like Dorsey you may as well ditch me on the planet because that would be about the only place to put me to keep me away from the crew.”

“So it’s fine that as your captain I ought to know these things, but as your friend and partner, you don’t think I need to know?”

His voice was flat, dulled of everything but hurt. Leonard stood up shakily, a hand resting against the wall to steady himself, but he faced Jim, trying to salvage something from this. “God no. I just…” he paused hoping to come up with something that made an ounce of sense for both of them. “I didn’t know how to say it. I couldn’t find the right time, or the right words to say anything that wouldn’t make you worry more. And that would have been worse because I need you to be the strong and sane one right now, because I can’t keep pretending that this doesn’t scare the hell out of me,” he paused, swallowing hard. “I’m scared Jim, and I need you.”

For a brief moment Jim’s face showed his shock, before he stepped forward and pulled Leonard into a tight embrace. He could faintly hear Jim’s litany of whispered expressions, nearly every other word spoken was ‘fine.’ _You’re fine, we’re fine, it’ll be fine. Fine. Fine. Fine_. It was almost enough for Leonard to believe him, nevertheless he was grateful when Jim pulled back, his hands lingering on Leonard’s shoulders; because if Jim was scared too he didn’t let it show.

“Sickbay. I want to know everything so we can find a way to fix this and make sure no-one else has to suffer either.”

Leonard’s reluctant nod of acceptance was answered by a squeeze of Jim’s hands before they fell away. He missed the comfort as soon as it was gone, and he couldn’t suppress a shiver, whether of dread or cold he couldn’t tell.

The walk to sickbay reminded him of the walk they’d taken only a day or two ago when they’d been released. The tension was as palpable, yet instead of relief hanging over them, this time it was with a sense of fear. Jim’s shoulder still brushed his every few steps, and Leonard let that brief contact comfort him. When they reached their destination, Jim let him go first. He pulled M’Benga aside and headed for one of the private examination rooms, letting the door slide shut behind them before he moved to lean back against the room’s biobed.

M’Benga was looking back and forth between Jim and himself in the resulting silence, Jim’s gaze fixed on him, a prompt to get things moving. Leonard closed his eyes and sighed.

“Remember we talked about monitoring cell regeneration the morning after the incident?” Leonard couldn’t bring himself to call it anything else. M’Benga nodded. “I gave you permission to look at my records. Did you do it at any point?”

“No. I thought if something was wrong you’d talk to someone.”

Jim shifted his stance but made no attempt to comment. He didn’t need to. Leonard knew exactly what he thought about M’Benga’s assumption.

Leonard scratched the back of his neck before answering. “You might want to.”

M’Benga didn’t move at first, no doubt trying to decide if that was an instruction for now or later, but after a moment he moved to collect one of the spare PADD’s that was housed in the room. Leonard pushed himself up to sit on the edge of the biobed, giving M’Benga his time to read the data, while trying not to look in Jim's direction to see what he expected would be disappointment on Jim’s face. He knew he’d screwed up by not talking to anyone, least of all Jim. He knew despite the promises they’d made when they'd started out, that even if they hadn’t have been partners, Jim was his friend and would have expected him to talk to him. He would have expected that in return.

M’Benga lowered the PADD, and when Leonard turned to look at him, M’Benga inclined his head to where Leonard knew the tricorders were stored. “Can I?”

He shrugged, knowing that it wouldn’t show anything that wasn’t already in his records, but as a doctor he knew that taking those readings for yourself gave you proof that you could no longer deny. “Go ahead.”

He managed to stay still as M’Benga ran his scans, pushing down on the urge to fidget and take the equipment out of his hand to do it himself. The entire time Jim remained still and silent, and Leonard couldn’t read him. He finally moved when M’Benga set the tricorder down.

“Talk to me.”

He glanced at M’Benga briefly before Leonard turned back to Jim and began his explanation. “In Dorsey’s autopsy it was revealed that the parahippocampal gyrus area of the brain was enlarged. This area is generally related to spacial recognition, the collective contents of the visual area, essentially contextualizing what you see. It’s also the area of the brain that they’ve shown becomes more active in telepaths and those with psi-abilities. That’s the area of my brain that has been showing high rates of cell regeneration and growth.”

“Are you saying you’re telepathic?” Jim asked, his hands clenching into fists.

Leonard shook his head. “Not right now. But I’m expecting it to develop based on what I experienced with Dorsey.”

Jim started to pace. “Can you do anything to stop its development?”

“No. That area of the brain is practically inaccessible without doing some major damage to get there. Even if it wasn’t, I don’t like the chances of stopping something when I don’t know what triggered it in the first place or what the mechanisms of growth are.”

Jim stopped pacing and leaned back against the wall opposite him. “What’s going to happen if it doesn’t stop growing?”

Jim’s question was quiet, and Leonard hated the answer he would have to give, dropping his voice to match. “You try to expand something when there isn’t enough space and you start creating problems. The end result will be the same, and I can’t say if I’ll feel it or not, or whether I’ll be sane enough to know it.”

Jim was silent for so long that Leonard struggled to stay still. Jim’s face was a riot of emotion, from pain to fear and everything in between. He settled on defiant when he came to speak, and as he did so Leonard could see Jim slowly rubbing his ‘repaired’ thumb against his finger. “But you can heal what’s wrong in others, right?” Leonard nodded, apparently so. “Yourself too?”

“Yes, but…” Out of the corner of his eye he saw M’Benga straighten at the admission.

“Can’t you fix this?”

Leonard shook his head. “I’ve tried. That’s what I had been trying to do earlier back in our quarters, but I’m attempting to fix the source of the problem _with_ the problem. I think that the rates of growth are linked to how much I use it, but I don’t have that control, I can’t shut it off. I can feel the guy three decks down stubbing his toe on the dresser, and I see every capillary that was shot through in the scar I got on my knee one day at Gramps farm when climbing fences.”

“And you saw everything in the scar on my thumb before you repaired it.”

It was a statement Jim voiced, not a question, as if he was giving himself time to comprehend it all but Leonard nodded anyway under Jim’s gaze. He warred with himself for a moment, in the end opting not to tell Jim that he could feel the shard of rock split his own skin. Jim looked like he had another question to ask, but instead he turned to M’Benga.

“I want you to run every test you can think of and a few you can’t. I’ll send Spock down to help you once you have the results. Find me a cause, and a cure, or at the very least something to stop its progression.”

He’d taken a few steps to the door before Leonard found his voice. “Jim…”

“Bones, just do this for me, please?”

When Jim turned back to him he was wearing the one determined expression that Leonard knew he couldn’t fight against. He’d seen it too many times, seen the results that flowed from it with each no-win scenario fought and survived. It gave him comfort. No matter whether he believed it or not, Jim did, and he’d told Jim he needed him to be the strong one. This was his strength shining through. Leonard couldn’t do anything other than nod his acceptance. Because while the tests were still incomplete, Jim would have something to put his faith in, some belief that there would be something that could fix this. He just hated to think where Jim would turn once there was nothing else to try; where he himself would turn once Jim ran out of options.

Leonard stared at the closed door long after Jim had left. He was startled when M’Benga laid a hand on his shoulder. “Are you okay?”

Leonard huffed, a sound caught somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “I feel fine.”

“That’s not what I was asking.”

Leonard turned his attention from the door to M’Benga and shrugged, M’Benga’s hand fell away. “I came back from the dead, only to have a ticking time bomb in my head with no explanations for it. I can feel each minor bump and scrape that each clumsy crewmember inflicts on themselves, and I can fix a paper-cut in under a second. I’m about to become a guinea pig for my own staff, and I’m guessing that I’ll be spending the night on this biobed. I’m peachy, thanks for asking.”

M’Benga snorted. “Yeah, you feel fine.”

His words were strained, but Leonard read the attempt at humor and he chuckled, his posture sagging. “Do your worst,” he sighed. “I’m sure between us and Spock we can come up with a barrage of invasive procedures that will scar me for life.”

M’Benga nodded and moved away to gather together what he’d need. Leonard’s gaze strayed back to the closed door, feeling Jim’s absence more than he’d like to admit.


	7. Chapter 7

*******

 

Leonard had taken M’Benga’s poking and prodding, and Spock’s questions with as much aplomb as he could, which was to say barely any. Bending over microscopes of tissue samples and his own blood had felt like a pointless endeavor considering he could see into his own body seemingly with ease. Proof of just how little was actually wrong with him came with each timer on a test, and each assessment of a tricorder, until there was nothing else to check that would give them anything to work with. That was when Spock decided that simulations and hypotheses were the next step, analyzing the bio-agents they’d detected on the surface of the planet, and comparing it to the drugs in Dorsey’s med bay.

It was all well and good looking for a cure when you didn’t know the cause. None of the tests showed up any chemical or biological irregularities that might have suggested how he’d been ‘infected.’ There was no trace of any nanotechnology or other organic entities and it was a puzzle that Leonard couldn’t solve any more now than he could when Dorsey had first presented him with the medical reports of the dead.

He’d been called back into sickbay a couple of times to see crewmembers with the usual myriad of complaints, and when his comm sounded the third time McCoy opted to just stay there, leaving Spock and M’Benga to look for the impossible. He selfishly hoped by doing so that any questions from Jim would be directed to the other two.

His latest patient had been complaining of a sore throat, and he dispatched him after a hypospray full of macrolides and an order to the bridge for a sweep of the environmental controls for strep bacteria. He couldn’t offer an explanation to Chekov as to how the virus got on board, or why regular sensor sweeps missed it, and he guessed it was only really starting to manifest now with the lowered immune systems through exhaustion and stress. However, getting people to rest up wasn’t going to cut it until they could warp out towards Starbase 6 for that R&R. With all that in mind he headed into one of the labs, one not occupied by Spock and M’Benga, to see if the strain of strep they were dealing with was new, adapted to space travel, or picked up off one of their away missions.

The lab was quiet when the door slid shut behind him, and he breathed in deep, smelling the clean filtered air that circulated through, the slight chill causing him to shiver. It always bothered him that they never got the temperature right in the labs, one gripe that Jim was all too familiar with but seemed reluctant when it came to rectifying it. He slotted the small vial of blood into an unused sample tray and slid it along the table as he headed for the analyzer. He settled on the stool and rested his elbows in the bench as the machine fired up, the calm around him making him feel small in what felt like a suddenly vacuous room. He reached out with his mind beyond the door looking for a bump or scrape to prove he wasn’t alone, but all that served in doing was giving him a headache. When the machine beeped in front of him he shook his head and pulled back to his task in hand.

He pulled up comparable databases of the bacterial strains on his PADD and laid it down to one side before placing some of the blood sample in the machine. He put the settings where he wanted them and pressed the button that would let the machine do its job, before resting his chin on his hands. The screen on the analyzer blurred when he suddenly yawned and he resisted making the effort to blink it back into focus just yet. He barely slept last night, losing time to tests and questions, spending an eternity trying to find some way to make the biobed comfortable. It made him more sympathetic to his patients when they protested that they would sleep better in their own beds. By morning he would have sworn blind that he could have slept better on a bed of thorns.

Jim had stopped by before his shift and Leonard had been glad to see him, thankful that no matter what concerns Jim had, he was still positive in the light of no overnight progress. He didn’t realize how much he needed that until Jim had walked in. After a night of barely any sleep, of Spock’s questions every time he flinched at someone’s pain, he was feeling raw and irritable. Jim had sent him away for a shower and a change of clothes, for which he was grateful. While he was showering he’d wondered what might have been talked about while he’d been out of the room, but he figured it was unlikely anything had been said that he didn’t already know. Although, if Spock came at him offering mind-melds Leonard had a creative refusal in hand and ready to go.

Jim had disappeared by the time he returned and Leonard was feeling his absence. It seemed such a turnabout, that after days of giving Jim the brush-off due to too much work and not enough sleep, that he was feeling what Jim must have felt. But he stopped before seeking Jim out, stopped before comm-ing him to see if he was coming home. He wondered how hard it had been for Jim to keep trying, to keep hoping that he’d say yes just once. He needed to fix it. If whatever was happing was inevitable, he needed to show Jim that he was sorry and that it hadn’t been a mistake to get together.

A bark of laughter brought him back to the present, and when the conversation got louder he turned his head to the door to send whoever had walked in straight back out again. There was no-one there though, and the conversation he heard drifted out of hearing again. It was as if someone in the corridor had walked past his open door; into his consciousness and back out again. He stared at the still closed door to the lab until the analyzer bleeped at him again, he blinked at the display until it came into focus and put the voices down to tiredness, even if a nagging voice remained in his head which said he was just fooling himself.

A few tweaks and tests later and Leonard had convinced himself that the strain of strep was evolved from Earth-bound versions of the bacteria, but he figured a few comparable tweaks with the current treatments should work. He was settling in to work on that when the whispers started. The first one had him looking over his shoulder, trying to find the source of the words he couldn’t quite work out. By the third time he heard something he was on his feet turning in circles, but other than the whispers, the room was as clear as it had been when he entered it. He’d even checked the comm on the wall, but to his non-technical eyes there was nothing wrong with it. It was only then that Dorsey’s words came back to him, and that it started to sink in that those whispers would soon turn into other people’s thoughts and feelings.

The whispers came and went as he worked, and he tried to ignore them the best he could, but by the time he’d finalized the new formula for the drug he was verging on talking to himself to drown them out. He set the treatment up to replicate enough to cover two-thirds of the crew, doubting he’d need that much but if he did have any spares he could hand them over to Starfleet for them to replicate and re-distribute. He’d have a report to write and send out to them before they made it to Starbase 6; provided they ever got there. He swallowed when he thought about the growth of his brain cells and wondered if he’d be around long enough to even see the starbase.

He jumped when the comm sounded and it took him a moment to decide that the voice was really there this time, but as Chapel’s words came with his name he opted to listen. When he walked back into sickbay he found his strep case from earlier sitting back on the edge of a biobed looking as miserable as he had before, which wasn’t that surprising considering the apparent hours he’d wiled away in the lab. He was surprised at another biobed being occupied with an Argelian with a darkening bruise and cut above his eye that was turning one side of his face red. He paused just inside the door, wondering how he’d managed to not notice that head injury taking place, when every other ailment and injury he’d seen and felt before his sickbay doors slid open for the new patient. The thought trickled through that maybe he had a limit, that non-human races could be his Achilles heel… or his lifesaver.

He handed over some of the newly synthesized treatment to Chapel with the express instruction to keep the crewman in sickbay until he could be sure of its effectiveness and lack of side-effects. Picking up a tricorder he headed to his second patient. While he let the equipment do its work he couldn’t help but reach out to see if he could actually use the abilities with an alien race. The differences in human and Argelian biology weren’t that great, just slight differences in blood chemistry and organ positioning, but he wondered if the different wiring in their brains could be enough to keep things separate. Concentrating on the injury though, there was nothing beyond what he could see with the naked eye and a tricorder, and he barely held the sigh of relief in check when he got Tybo to lay back on the biobed.

He picked up the regenerator and adjusted the settings to his patient, but as he went to put the equipment in position his fingers brushed against the Argelian’s skin and it was as if the dam opened. He could see the accident in the botany lab, the trip over a watering hose left clumsily coiled, the blossom of pain that came from the impact between head and bench. He hissed and took a step back away from the bed, and that’s when he not only saw, but felt, Tybo’s fear at his reaction.

Leonard swallowed and stammered out an apology, an excuse that he’d stubbed his toe on the bed. He swallowed deeply when he stepped forward again, trying to ignore the trickle of Tybo’s thoughts as he worried about what he’d done, at how stupid he was to have tripped in the first place, of how he just wanted the chance to go home and see his family like he should have done days ago. McCoy gritted his teeth and set the regenerator going, and when his hands fell away this time, he could see that injury laid out in front of him, where the split veins and blood vessels were, the source of the pain.

He stepped back to get a hypospray of painkiller in a bid to stop himself from just reaching out to repair the damage himself, and as he walked further away Tybo’s thoughts became quieter, less intrusive. There was a pull to _fix it_ he was trying to ignore as he jammed the cartridge into the hypospray a little too forcefully, and he breathed deeply to calm himself down enough to administer it to his patient without causing Tybo any more bruising.

Leonard muttered some comforting remarks, about how it was nothing and he’d be out of here soon, just to lie back and relax. He paused before walking over to where Chapel was talking to the other patient, reluctant to test his limits with another bout of inner thoughts. With a soft sigh he collected the tricorder and walked over.

“How are you feeling now, Baker?” He asked the question, knowing his answer.

“Much better thanks,” Baker said, though his voice was still hoarse.

“Anything unusual about your symptoms from before?” Although he’d felt the sore throat that he’d pinned on Baker while in the lab, he hadn’t been able to match up any of the other ailments that were flying around the ship to the same person.

Baker shook his head. “I’ve had it before, and I wouldn’t say anything was different. It’s just normally the usual drugs are enough to clear it up in a couple of hours. I figured when it didn’t get much better I should come back.”

Leonard glanced up when a trickle of nervousness slipped through his mind, only to realize that it was coming from Baker. He didn’t think he had that bad a reputation that people actually feared stepping through his doors, but clearly there was something people were uncomfortable with. “You figured right,” he said, hoping that his tone was gentle enough to ease, which when the trickle of apprehension turned to relief he guessed he’d done fine. “Looks like we have a new strain that Starfleet is going to want to know about if it’s capable of living on a starship with all their bio-filters. Hopefully this tweaked serum will work until we can sweep the ship. You need to let me know the minute something doesn’t feel right though.”

As Baker nodded, Leonard figured he may just know sooner than Baker if something was wrong. “I’m feeling a lot better,” he said with a smile, and Leonard knew he was telling the truth. “Guess we all just need a holiday now, right?”

Leonard snorted. “Tell me about it,” he muttered. The tricorder signaled the end of its analysis and Leonard glanced at the readings until he was sure they said what he already knew. He thought about Baker’s raw throat, the twinge of pain when he still swallowed and the accompanying burn of heat. It didn’t take much thought to dial it down for him, just a soothing of inflammation that seemed even easier to fix than the scar on Jim’s thumb.

Leonard cleared his throat when the burn settled there, making a show of fiddling with the tricorder. “Well, I can’t see any reason to keep you here. But like I said, I need to know if you feel anything else.”

Baker nodded. “I’ll comm straightaway. Thanks, Dr McCoy.” His voice was brighter, the hoarseness of before gone.

“No problem.” He watched him walk away, the tightness in his throat increasing as he realized that Baker wasn’t the last of the crew in need of the new serum. He swallowed sharply against the pain in his throat and turned to Chapel. “I’m going to get the Bridge to send out a ship-wide announcement, get people in here before the strep can spread too far. I think the new treatment will work fine based on these results. Our next job will be to see if we can sort out something to add to the environmental controls to get rid of the rest of the bacteria.”

Chapel nodded. “And Ensign Tybo?”

McCoy glanced over to the occupied biobed, listening briefly to the botanist’s thoughts as he waited for the regenerator to finish, about where he’d take his son, and how much he missed his wife. “Once the regenerator has run its course, let me know, but I doubt there’ll be anything further. I’ll be in my office.”

He sunk into his desk chair in relief, and tried to force out of his mind the emotion he picked up from Chapel, one of concern. He’d surrounded himself with the best he could find, and he knew it would be too much to hope that they wouldn’t notice when he started to pull away. He had barely looked in the mirror of late, he hated to think what would greet him if he took the time to really look.

In the quiet of his office it was easier to hear the murmurs and whispers, not all of it he could make out. They’d be a clear thought or sentence occasionally, usually accompanied by a strong emotion or outburst, but they’d fade out almost as quickly as they came in. Sometimes he could work out who the thoughts belonged to, and those he tried to push away. When a blast of excited Russian he had no hope of understanding cut through everything else, McCoy shook his head, determined to not let this get on top of him.

He pressed the comm on his desk, waiting until Uhura answered. “Bridge.”

“Is Jim up there?” he asked.

“Not at the moment Doctor, I think he’s in the transporter room with Mr Scott. Would you like me to patch you through?”

“No that’s okay, Lieutenant. Can you put together a ship-wide broadcast for me?”

“Of course. What do you need?”

Leonard outlined the issue with the bacteria, and for all crewmembers that were experiencing symptoms to report to sickbay. When Uhura confirmed what he wanted, he asked to speak to Chekov. Trying to keep pace with the Russian whizz kid was not always easy at the best of times, but with heavily accented English sounding in his ears, and random exclamations in Russian in his head, Leonard was rapidly losing track. He rubbed at his temples and tried to bite back a groan.

“Ensign!” He hated how harsh that one word sounded.

“Yes, Sir?” Chekov sounded hesitant.

“Just stop for a second, cut the crap and tell me what the hell you need from me to make whatever the hell else you said before work.”

“I… sorry Sir. If you could send me the formula for the amended treatment, I can compare it to the current settings for the environmental controls and see where those need to be altered.”

“That I can do,” Leonard muttered, keying the command into a spare PADD on his desk.

“I will need to run the changes through yourself, yes?” Chekov asked, and Leonard hated how uncertain the kid sounded.

“I’ll have a look to make sure but I doubt it’s anything you can’t handle, Ensign.”

Chekov’s ‘yes, sir’ showed he was back to his usual confident sounding self, and Leonard felt old and tired in comparison when he signed off. He rubbed at his forehead when the headache there pounded dully against his skull, and for a moment he wondered if shoving his fingers in his ears would cut out the noise of all the whispers. He knew the only way he was going to ignore them was to keep busy, but he wasn’t sure he had the energy for that.

As it turned out, his crew kept him pretty busy. Security teams trying to outdo themselves in the gym, a chef with an overzealous chopping technique, and a mistimed throw of a PADD between roommates all kept the whispers at bay. He left Chapel with the hyposprays of strep treatment, hoping her distance would mean she wouldn’t ask, hell even think of, any awkward questions, and concentrated on the steady influx of accident-prone crew. But the treatments seemed so much easier, more effective, when he could just skip using regenerators.

By the time his last patient had hopped of the biobed and disappeared into the corridor, he felt better with what he could do. The downside was that he knew more about his patient’s innermost thoughts and sexual activities, but those concentrated thoughts were so much easier to deal with than the unintelligible mutterings of the crew as a whole. The problem was that when his last patient had gone, all that was left was those mutterings, only they weren’t so unintelligible any more.

His steps back to the science labs were mere shuffles of his feet. His first destination was the lab he’d been using earlier to gather the remainder of the replicated vials together, clean up and power down the machines. He’d send someone over for the rest of them later. He uttered the command to power the lights down and headed off to where he’d last seen M’Benga.

The lights in the lab were dimmer than he remembered them last, small desk lamps giving more illumination to where M’Benga was still working. He was alone though, and Leonard suspected that Spock had retreated to the Bridge for his shift there, probably still reading lines of code and sensor readings through the science station. He wasn’t too worried about the Vulcan, knowing he’d survive much longer and with more efficiency without sleep than mere humans could. Although Leonard was sure Spock would find less depreciating vocabulary, even if his tone would imply the same.

“Geoff, call it a day and get some rest. You’re not going to find anything on the back of your eyelids.”

M’Benga placed the PADD on the bench and sighed. “I’m fine. I’d rather keep at it.”

“And I’d rather have a fully functioning doctor should I need one rather than a walking zombie.”

M’Benga crossed his arms. “Is that an order, Sir?”

Leonard scrubbed a hand over his face and huffed out a breath. “If it has to be, then I can make it one.”

“I’d rather keep at this. You wouldn’t give in if you were doing this for anyone else, and I’m not about to give it up either.”

Leonard sat down wearily on one of the stools opposite M’Benga. “Look, I appreciate it. But at the moment I’m fine. I’m operating better than normal given the circumstances, but I can’t say how long that’s going to last for. If this thing takes me down I need someone to take over in sickbay who isn’t sleep deprived. As the second most senior doctor onboard it will be you that will need to step up. With the danger to the ground crews still working at the _Oresme_ I can’t let the department slacken their readiness in any way.”

M’Benga stared at the shining surface of the bench long enough that Leonard thought he might argue. As Leonard focused on him though, snippets of thoughts drifted through, enough for him to know that M’Benga was going to acquiesce long before he finally nodded his head. He knew how tired M’Benga was, and the last thing Leonard wanted was for anyone to suffer because of him. M’Benga pressed his fingers a few times to the screen of the PADD before powering it down and the shadows the bright screen had cast on the back wall blended into darkness.

Leonard nodded, satisfied that M’Benga was giving it a break before he stood. He waited by the door until M’Benga walked ahead of him, ordering the computer to power down what remained of the lights, casting another futile attempt to reconcile what was happening to him into pitch blackness. He followed M’Benga back out of sickbay, walking with him until they needed to part ways near their quarters. He nodded a good night and kept on walking until he was stood outside his own quarters, pausing briefly before finally keying in his code.

Jim sat within the dimly lit room, staring unseeing at a point on the wall. For a moment Leonard wondered what he was looking at, trying to resist the sudden urge to just take that peek inside his head. He stepped further into the room, enough to allow the doors to slide shut behind him. The movement caught Jim’s attention, and he blinked rapidly as he turned to look at him, a flash of some emotion on his face vanishing in a second.

“Hey,” Jim said softly.

“Hey. You okay?”

Jim huffed a sad laugh and averted his gaze as he fiddled unnecessarily with a PADD on the low table in front of him. “I spoke with Spock earlier. He said nothing had come up yet from what you’ve been working on.”

Leonard shrugged as he starting moving, sitting in the chair opposite Jim. “I figured as much. I thought the only thing that was possible to find was if the mechanism that triggered the abilities was also deliberately hiding its cause. I don’t need a microscope or a tricorder to see the details.”

Jim snorted as he tilted his head back to rest on the back of the couch. “And you don’t see what’s wrong with that picture?”

Leonard frowned. “Of course I see what’s damn wrong. Something that goes against all laws of nature and human anatomy, that’s what’s wrong. Hell, I bet Spock would tell you it went against some damn laws of physics too.”

“But?” Jim asked, his head tilted forward enough so he could look directly at Leonard. “Why do I sense you have a ‘but’ all ready and waiting?”

“Right now I feel okay. Right now I can see some good come out of this,” he replied softly.

Jim abruptly sat up, his hands going to grip the edge of the couch cushions. “You’re kidding me.” Disbelief carried his words, but Leonard could read the anger behind them too.

“I can fix people Jim, that’s all a doctor ever wants to do.”

“Even at the cost of their own health and sanity?”

Leonard met Jim’s stormy blue eyes. “You’re asking me that question? You of all people are asking me that question as though there’s another answer,” he stated flatly, before his voice rose with his next words. “Of course I’ll do everything I can, even if it means I might suffer from it.”

“I know you would do anything to save someone,” Jim said, his voice hard. “But this isn’t you. If this was happening to any other person you’d be sitting where I was telling them not be such a damn fool. You’d be in the lab, or parading around sickbay until you dropped from exhaustion, looking for a way to fix it. So why aren’t you doing it for yourself? Spock said you walked away from the simulations, left the lab to go back on duty in sickbay. Why are you accepting this?”

Leonard stood, his long strides taking him away from Jim until he was close enough to the opposite wall to press a hand to the cool surface. Jim’s thoughts were bubbling over, anger and hurt, pain and sorrow. He could feel Jim’s fear and confusion as palpable as if it was his own, and his heart raced in his chest in response. He heard Jim stand too, his bare feet barely making any sound as he walked across the carpet, stopping behind him just out of reach. A distance Leonard felt oh so keenly.

“Why Bones?” he asked, his voice nothing more than a whisper.

“What if I need it to save someone; to bring someone back?” he whispered in return.

“By someone, you mean me.” Jim’s words were a statement, but his thoughts were full of questions, on top of them all was the belief that he didn’t deserve that sacrifice, of what it was that he’d done to make people throw their lives away for him.

Leonard’s hand slid down the wall, the sound loud in the silence, and he turned, resting his back against the metal. “I’m a doctor, Jim. People look to me to fix them and there are times when I’m not good enough.” He paused as he swallowed thickly. “I just can’t lose anyone else.”

Jim huffed, a sound caught between a laugh and a sob. His hands gripped Leonard’s shoulders. That simple action opened Jim’s mind up and Leonard could only stare back as everything, each thought, each feeling became clear. “I’d rather have a year of what we had before this came along, than a lifetime of whatever this is doing to you,” he said, squeezing his shoulders.

Leonard knew he was hearing the truth, knew what pain the thought of a single year would bring as he saw Jim’s own fears recreate a spectrum of scenarios. “Jim…”

“I won’t let you become something you’re not. I promised you. You wanting this, it’s not you. Before you would never have considered taking on God-like powers, no matter what they were, so don’t try to grab hold of them now. You’re not going to become him.”

Leonard sucked in a harsh breath as he saw what Jim had imagined happening to him on the _Oresme_ , of each breath of air desperately forced in and out of his lungs under Dorsey’s clenched hand.

“What would you do if it were you?” Leonard whispered hoarsely. “If you knew you could save even one person.”

He didn’t need to hear Jim’s words to know what he was thinking. Jim’s hands slid off his shoulders. “You said this was going to kill you if it kept growing.” Leonard dipped his head. “You’ve also said you thought that the rate of progression was linked to how much you used the powers. If you stopped you could last longer, maybe long enough to give us the time to fix it.”

Leonard shook his head. “Jim, don’t.”

“Bones, I’m asking you to stop. Just give us a chance, just a little faith.”

“I’m not even sure I can,” he said with a shake of his head, hating the way Jim’s thoughts darkened. Jim raised a hand towards his cheek, but aborted the move before Leonard could feel his touch.

Jim turned his back and stepped away, pausing halfway across the room. “Will you try?”

His turned back and Jim’s open thoughts told Leonard all he needed to know, that no matter what he said Jim would struggle to believe him. For a brief moment he warred with himself as to whether to tell Jim that he could hear people’s thoughts now. That the time Jim needed in order to get his answer was running out so much quicker than he knew. But in the end he didn’t say anything. He walked to the doors, pausing just before his proximity would trigger them opening.

“I’m not going to sit back and watch someone suffer when I can stop it. That goes against everything I am.”

 _Not everything_ Jim’s thoughts echoed in his head, resigned to the answer he didn’t want.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, before taking that step to trigger the doors, not slowing his pace until the doors to his office slid shut behind him. He sank down on the cot he left unfolded before kicking off his boots. Sleeping on the cot always broke his back, but he could fix that in the morning, it was about all he could fix right now. He doubted it would be as easy to fix as what was eroding away of his relationship with Jim.

The ceiling stared back at him as he lay down, and when he closed his eyes there was someone else’s dreamscape, a house familiar and homely even though he’d never seen it before. The longer he lay in the darkness the more dreams filtered through until they interchanged like the turn of a kaleidoscope, becoming clearer with snatches of memories and familiar faces. If Jim had asked he would have been telling the truth when he said he tried to switch it off. Spock’s imaginary shields helped for a while, until a nightmare shattered them under the terror the sufferer had seen.

Hours passed while he tried to build up walls, but it felt like with each brick he placed, there would be another voice to shore his defenses against. His own dreams didn’t come that night, lost as he was in everyone else’s. Sleep was just a distant hope, and when morning came, the dreams left only to be replaced by the constant chatter and active thoughts of an awakened crew.


	8. Chapter 8

*******

 

Leonard spent most of the morning staring at the surface of his desk, seeing nothing of the brushed metal. The swell of thoughts and conversations swarmed around him, swooping in and out of focus like birds diving into watery depths. It was giving him a headache thinking about it, but that pain worsened when he tried to push it all back out of his mind. The shield he finally managed to erect shimmered and threatened to fall the minute he breathed in. One, two deep breaths later and his shield held, maybe not firm, but enough to muffle the voices a little so they were back to those whispers of yesterday, something slightly more bearable.

He blinked back some moisture into his eyes, his focus coming back to his hands resting on the top of the desk. It was too quiet in sickbay to keep him occupied, and it had only taken one failed attempt at clearing out the last of his reports to realize that he was too distracted by everything going on around the ship. Mostly he was too distracted by what was going on in his head, with his head, and more importantly with Jim. He looked for that familiar mind but found nothing, and it was the computer that had to inform him that Jim was off the ship again. To top it all off, whatever efforts he’d made seeking Jim out left a crack in his shield that he struggled to patch back up.

The rip in his shield felt like a tear in his head, the trickle of thoughts pushing back in, stinging and burning. He dropped his forehead to rest against the cooler metal of his desk, wishing that he hadn’t been so quick to walk out of their quarters last night when Jim had asked just one thing of him, to just try.

A ripple of panic interrupted his thoughts, and he tried to sort through the feelings looking for a cause. The comm on his desk chimed out only a second before Uhura’s voice filtered through the speakers in sickbay warning of an incoming medical emergency from the planet. He trusted his staff to deal with the initial rush and prep while he responded to the comm from Spock.

“Doctor, we have reports of injured crew on the _Oresme_. We are in the process of beaming up two persons.”

“There’ll be someone in the transporter room to meet them.”

“I have no doubt, however, we are concerned that we have encountered an area of the base where some of the more unstable materials have been stored. We believe this area was the source of the original explosion, at the moment we have not been able to fully identify those elements for which containment has been breached, however we will continue to try to do so.”

“Do you still have the _Oresme_ engineer working with the teams?”

Spock paused briefly, but it was enough to give Leonard his answer, even without the subsequent words. “Mr Elim unfortunately perished in the same incident.”

“Damn,” Leonard muttered, selfishly hoping that he could leave the unpleasant task of informing what was left of the station’s crew to someone else. “We’ll do what we can here, and I’ll let you know the minute we get any results on exposure, if you wouldn’t mind doing likewise.”

“Of course. Bridge out.”

Leonard was out of his seat before Spock had finished, and he couldn’t stop himself from reaching out looking for those injuries. He knew when the transport happened, the pain of multiple injuries shimmered in like the transporter itself, pinpoints of pain starbursting into focus until he knew what he was looking at.

He couldn’t see anything within the injuries that spoke of chemical or biological exposure, the replay in his mind of how the injuries occurred were due to a collapsing wall under the pressure release that had come when they’d tried to breach the last of the labs. He split his team up to handle each of the injuries as he saw their severity, and by the time the two patients arrived in sickbay they were ready.

Leonard may have had a tricorder in his hand, but the diagnoses came quicker in his head, and the orders for equipment he gave to his nurses were instinctive. He could hear his second patient talking to M’Benga about what had happened, but his fear bubbled over and Leonard had to grit his teeth to ignore it in order to fully concentrate on his own patient. With a twist and pull of his hands he reset the compound fracture in Rawlins’ left arm, his mind straightening and fixing the nerve fibers that had been damaged by falling cross beams. When he made to start to fix the fractured bone, he stopped himself, aware that trying to fix too much by himself would cause his nurses to start noticing, start asking questions he wasn’t ready to answer. He held out a hand to Chapel for the regenerator, making sure to set the equipment to close the open wounds before fixing the bone later.

Spock’s voice came through the sickbay’s speakers then. “Medical alert. Incoming patient into the transporter room. Widespread chemical burns, no identification yet of affective agent.”

“Acknowledged,” Leonard called out.

Leonard pointed to two nurses, “Take chem suits and go,” he barked, not waiting to see if they acknowledged him or not before he turned to M’Benga. “We’ve no idea what’s coming in,” he said quietly. “I want to handle this by myself.” He held up a hand to forestall the protest he saw forming in M’Benga’s mind. “I can protect myself from this but I can’t say the same for anyone else until I see what’s happened. We’ve no idea what’s going on down there or if this will be the last patient we get, I need you to keep on top of things.”

M’Benga nodded reluctantly. “What happens if we get someone else as badly injured?”

Leonard glanced around the sickbay. “Then we’ll have to deal with it when it happens, but we all know through experience the first is usually the worst. I’m going to use Room 2, just keep everyone out of there.”

“If you need anything…”

“Yeah, I’ll let you know. In the meantime Collinson’s got a fracture in the left tibia, and Rawlins will need that cut on his head cleaned out because there’s debris in it.”

“We’ve got it,” M’Benga said, before Leonard could go into any more detail on the more minor scrapes and bruises.

Leonard nodded and headed for the OR. The second the transport was finished Leonard knew this incoming injury was bad. Half of his body felt like it had ignited, heat singeing the skin across his face and down his torso and limbs. He bit his bottom lip to push it back, but not before he knew just how bad a state the engineer was in. It didn’t take long for the nurses to appear with the isolation stretcher and he ushered them straight into the treatment room.

From the time the patient had been transported up Leonard had been monitoring the woman's vital signs sensing them blip and fall with each second that passed. There was no word from the surface as to what kind of chemical burns they were looking at, so all he could do was treat the injuries as best he could. As soon as his patient was out of isolation and on the biobed he sent his nurses out, told them to get him the information he needed about what chemicals he was looking at. He nodded in thanks at M’Benga when he stopped Chapel from protesting and trying to stay with him.

A tightening in his chest had him turning back to his patient just as the biobed sensor alarms began to blare out. Dropping oxygen saturation, dropping BP. Whatever the chemical was it had burnt through clothing, and her entire left arm was raw and blistered, her side and thigh no better. Her face was splashed red, as though paint had exploded across her, the chemical only burning where it touched. He saw the container explode in his mind, whether heat or pressure had affected it, he didn’t know, but the moment it had been touched the unstable liquid exploded outwards.

He shook his head back to the present when the tone of the alarms changed, and he knew he was losing her. It was instinct that steadied her heart rate, and somehow he kept her lungs pulling in the air they needed until the alarms settled down. When he was sure she was stable he turned to the burns, seeing their depth in the dermal layers. He figured it was going to take some time to fix them, the extent of their reach meaning he’d have to take it one step at a time, but as he started at the deepest parts he felt he could be more general, less focused and it would still work.

There was a rhythm in his head to which he kept time with her breathing and heartbeat, and that ticked away like a metronome in the back of his mind as he concentrated on lymph and blood vessels, nerves and dermal layering. Once he got started, he found he could look deeper, see layers of injuries, of old breaks and hidden scars. But there was one scar below the burns on her arm that had never been touched by a regenerator. He concentrated on it until its outline became clear, all jagged edges and white scar tissue, the skin so thin in comparison to that next to it.

He gasped, and the sinus rhythm that was beating out of the biobed sensors stuttered until he could grasp hold of it again. There was so much anguish in that one scar. He couldn’t pin it down to when or how, such was the cloud of emotion that shrouded it. All he knew was that the associated events to the scar were felt deeply, something horrific enough to shape someone’s life. He had no idea why the scar stayed when it seemed to him to be completely healed. Regenerators would have at least lessened its presence, fortified the thin scar tissue. There was something nagging in his mind, but when faced with such anguish he did what he thought was right, he let himself rebuild the tissue, to take away the reminder, and hopefully ease that memory.

He had no idea how much time was passing, only that one moment he blinked and there was nothing left to fix. He took his hand from where it had lain against her skin, Lieutenant Coburn he realized now he looked close enough. He was reluctant to let go of that rhythm too, that comfortable pulse that told him she still lived, but he forced himself to gingerly let go, hoping that instinct would allow her heart and lungs to pick up on their own. There was a stutter, arrhythmia setting in momentarily before warning lights drifted back into green.

When the Lieutenant’s vitals finally settled down, and he knew everything was going to be okay, he finally stepped back from the biobed. He breathed deeply, pushing away any tingling hurt that had transposed to his own body, and couldn’t help but think that whatever he was doomed to go through was worth it. This was what he had tried to convince Jim of, that for a doctor to stand by and do nothing when he had the means to end someone’s pain, was not something he could ever do. It felt right. Or at least it did until he turned round and saw Jim standing stiffly to one side of the closed door.

He didn’t know why he hadn’t heard Jim come in, or even his thoughts before then, because they were suddenly singing loudly, drowning out everyone else’s, drowning out even the noise from the organized chaos in sickbay and the mental chatter of the ship’s personnel. For that moment when their eyes met, it was as if they were the only two people around.

Jim’s mouth was pressed into a tight line, his emotions rolling off him in waves that threatened to drown him and Leonard hated that he was able to truly see what Jim felt. He couldn’t deny what Jim felt for him - the love, the hate, the pride, the disappointment. Jim’s sadness and feeling of loss nearly broke him, the thought that no matter what, Leonard was going to leave him alone. There was a hint of anger when Jim looked at the Lieutenant, as if she was the reason that Leonard would leave, but Jim beat that thought away before it could take over him. When Jim turned back to him his thoughts were more settled, resignation battling with determination. Leonard almost believed him when Jim convinced himself he could fix him.

Jim didn’t say anything, but he nodded sharply before retreating from sickbay. He didn’t need to ask how his crewmembers were doing, because Jim knew that Leonard would not stop until they were okay. As Jim walked away his thoughts were caught up in a roar of noise that overwhelmed Leonard's pathetic shields, leaving his lover as just one more voice swimming in a sea of hundreds.


	9. Chapter 9

*******

 

Leonard knew the minute Coburn started to wake. He didn’t think he’d notice one more voice in a discordant symphony of hundreds, but sleepy confusion eased into the melee of noise. The earlier organized chaos had calmed down, and of the three crewmembers still occupying his biobeds only Coburn had been unconscious. He’d moved her out to the main sickbay after Jim had left, the move backed up by confirmation from Spock that the chemical was volatile, toxic on contact with the skin but rendered inert by that initial reaction. The chatter between his other two patients had been low enough for most people to not take notice, but as Leonard got the entire conversation plus unspoken subtitles in his head he knew enough to know that they were in pretty good spirits, despite the situation.

Coburn’s waking was muffled, odd disjointed thoughts coming from the unnatural blackness of unconsciousness. He made his way over before her eyelids started to flutter, and just waited for that moment when clarity started to filter through her mind. It came with a jolt, a spread of awareness, before there was a full replay of what occurred down in the station running through her mind. He tried not to wince at the heat that spread over his skin at her memory, but the fabric of his shirt felt like it was sticking to open sores.

When she finally opened her eyes, he’d gotten a hold of the phantom pain, pushing it back while he assessed whether she felt any discomfort.

“Lieutenant, how are you feeling?”

He knew without her needing to say anything, but old habits were hard to break and the words tripped off his tongue before he even thought about them. He waited as her thoughts focused on his question, a pain assessment, memories. When her gaze dropped to where the fire had done the most damage against the skin of her arm he felt her panic. His first thought was that she was worried about what she would find, and he was ready with reassurances that everything was fine and healed. What he read instead threatened to overwhelm him.

Her thoughts changed again, this time full of grief and loss, so many changing emotions and memories that he couldn’t grasp hold of them in order to decipher what they meant. The repeated chant of _no_ that started in her head soon became fervent whispers as she struggled to sit up, eyes fixed to the clear unblemished skin of her forearm. Her thoughts focused then, to that one moment Coburn defined as the end of everything.

Leonard could feel the shuddering of the deck under his feet as the Narada’s firepower cut through the walls of Deck 6 like paper, bulkheads collapsed and the heat of explosions burned the air around him. There was a sharp pain in the side of his skull but it ended so suddenly that he dismissed it as not his own. Images then flitted through his mind of darkened corridors lit only by flame and the red hue of emergency lighting, making the blood harder to see under his feet. There was screaming then, tearing through head and ears in tandem, fueled with desperation and denial. His hands burned, and he could feel metal slicing through the skin of his arms and fingers. Falling hot metal broke bone, cauterizing the jagged cuts it had caused, but that faded away when all those thoughts coalesced into the broken face and vacant eyes of a loved one. Leonard didn’t know the face, but there was such love and loss associated with it that he shouldn’t have been surprised when he saw Jim’s face instead when he blinked.

It was enough to shock him back into his own head, gasping for air as he tried to force Ami Coburn’s thoughts out of his mind. Her screams echoed in his head, a mixture of those from her memories and those from now as she relived that nightmare. Pulling himself together, Leonard caught her arms as she tried to scratch at the old scar site, the red welts she caused on her skin fading quickly without him needing to concentrate on them beyond a cursory thought. His grip tightened when she started to thrash about, and he called over his shoulder for one of the nurses to grab a sedative to calm her, to still her. Even as he spoke he felt her struggles lessen, but the panic still sat in her eyes when he turned his gaze back, and for one horrified moment before the sedative was injected he realized that he was doing what Dorsey had done to him, and was keeping her immobile.

The torrent on his mind of Coburn’s memories, grief, loss and even hate lessened quickly once the sedative started to work. He could sense the spread of the drug as it passed through her bloodstream, relaxing muscles, and shutting down parts of her brain. But it didn’t take away the memories of what she’d felt, nor the pain, and Leonard sagged against the biobed as he tried to sort out what was real, and what wasn’t in the maelstrom of images. And what stayed with him was that brief snapshot of Jim’s face instead of that of Coburn’s fiancé, and the fact that he’d done exactly what Dorsey did.

“Are you okay?”

M’Benga’s softly spoken words came with a wave of concern that Leonard wished he could ignore as it crashed over the last of his battered control. He sucked in a breath as the noise of the ship flooded back into his mind, louder now than before, more acute as snippets of thoughts from the menu in the mess to the scans of the _Oresme_ on the bridge all fought for primacy at the forefront of his mind. M’Benga’s hand on his arm brought him back into his own head, and blinked into focus Coburn’s now relaxed face. He wondered briefly if the tear tracks that were drying on her face would be mirrored on his own, and he was thankful his palm came away dry when he scrubbed it over his face.

“The telepathy started, didn’t it?”

M’Benga’s voice was still low enough that it didn’t carry beyond the two of them, but Leonard straightened up. He caught the attention of one of the nurses. “Keep an eye on her, and let me know if she starts becoming unsettled or showing signs of waking up again.”

He waited for Kinsella’s acknowledgement, even though he knew he would know of any changes to his patient well before his nurse did. He beckoned M’Benga into his office, once the door had closed he indicated the seat opposite where he sat.

“When did it start?” M’Benga asked, breaking the silence when it stretched too long.

Leonard pushed a thumb against his temple and tried to focus on M’Benga’s mind in order to shut out the others. He thought about rebuilding that wall Spock had alluded to but it kept crumbling before he could get any higher than three courses of bricks. He gave in and started a steady count. _1..2..3..4.._

“It started with the odd comment or wayward thought yesterday that I dismissed at first. Then it became conversations, and the more I let myself concentrate on it the more expansive it got. Last night it became a storybook of dreams and late night conversations. I guess I didn’t sleep much.”

“You didn’t say anything.” M’Benga’s voice carried disappointment, but Leonard didn’t need to hear it to know the man was thinking it, along with that touch of anger that came with a promise broken.

“Yeah well,” he sighed, his hand waved in a silent apology, and a plea to let it drop. “Sickbay was a haven, because I could concentrate on the people that needed help, rather than the damn ensign that has a crush on Jim, or...”

“Does the Captain know about the telepathy?” M’Benga interrupted.

Leonard shook his head, his mind replaying snatches of Jim’s far too brief and tortured dreams, his worries and disappointment. “No.” He hoped that single word would say everything he couldn’t about how hard it was to say those words and put that worry onto someone else, how he’d rather suffer through than subject himself to more scrutiny by his staff and Spock’s curiosity. He didn’t think he could say a word to M’Benga about the memories and thoughts that came with old wounds, let alone to Jim with his years of pain and sorrow etched into his skin.

M’Benga leaned back in the chair with a sigh. “You need to. I’m pretty sure I heard you promise.”

“Don’t.”

His word of warning was harsh enough that he almost let an apology fall off his tongue, but he knew M’Benga hadn’t taken offence

“Leonard, he needs to know. He’s the Captain of this ship, but more importantly he’s your friend and partner. He’s worried about you, but he can’t help you if you don’t talk to him. You’re already looking for a haven down here, and I guess all you’re doing is trying to focus on one person at a time in order to try to push back all the noise. Let it be the Captain, let it be someone who knows you and who you know in return. That’s only fair to all of us, yourself and him included.”

He stared at M’Benga in silence, wondering if the thoughts about doing what was right that went through the man’s head were there because M’Benga knew he couldn’t stop himself from listening in. It was a mixture of concern, of how disappointed M’Benga would be in Jim’s place, of the violation people would likely feel if they knew their privacy was being invaded in such a way. The last was a point he could empathize with, of how much he would hate to be in the same position. He sighed and nodded, hoping Jim would understand.

His comm to the bridge was answered by Spock. “Doctor, how may I assist?”

“Can you tell me where the Captain is?”

“The Captain is currently on the planet overseeing the containment exercise with Mr Scott. I am expecting his return in three point two hours. Do you wish to be put through to his comm?”

Leonard paused long enough to glance at M’Benga before he replied. “No, that’s alright. I’ll speak to him when he beams back on board.”

“Acknowledged. Bridge out.”

He leaned back in his chair with a sigh. “I’ll tell him,” he said, before M’Benga could berate. “Feel free to check up on me if I haven’t.”

M’Benga shrugged, then rose to his feet. “I’m hoping that won’t be necessary. Although I’d like to run some scans if you’ll let me.”

“Do you honestly think they’ll tell you something that all the others failed to pick up?”

M’Benga glanced at his feet before he finally met Leonard’s gaze. “Probably not. Even for curiosity’s sake it probably won’t even help determine what goes on in a human mind subjected to psionic ability. But it will make me feel better, and will give me something at least to tell the Captain if he wants to know why I haven’t done anything to help you.”

“Geoff, I’m pretty certain if anyone’s going to be subjected to the Captain’s scrutiny and disapproval it will be me, don’t worry. But if it will make you feel any better about it, knock yourself out.”

M’Benga gave him a brief smile before he left to go grab whatever it was that he wanted to subject Leonard to this time. He eyed the closed door wishing it was as easy to shut out the noise as sliding a door shut. He frowned with the sudden thought of why not; it was easier to imagine something he could already see. He gave it a go, wrapped himself in a featureless room, solid white walls there to reflect everything, every thought. He imagined pushing it all out of the open door until there was nothing left but him. Stepping back in his mind he let those doors close.

He was surprised it worked. There was still a roar of noise, but it was muffled. The crowd was just outside those doors though and his ears pulsed with the pressure against his defenses, like water rushing past in a cacophony of noise. There was no rhythm to it though, nothing that coalesced into words and he didn’t dare risk the new found peace attempting to reach out. The pressure increased though, that roar of noise getting louder until he thought those doors would buckle under the strain, and he cringed as he waited for the tsunami of noise to wash over him again.

The doors didn’t buckle. They slid open as one voice suddenly came through all too clear. M’Benga’s voice let the dam open, Leonard’s white-walled haven flooded with noise again.

“I hope you don’t mind, I just let myself back in.”

He waved his hand, not trusting his voice to growl out his frustration until he could temper himself. He let his head fall until it rested on the back of his seat and listened to the low bleeps of the tricorder that M’Benga was working with. The ceiling became his focal point, his eyes following the random patterns in the brushed metal.

“So what’s it like?” M’Benga asked softly.

Leonard knew M’Benga had been warring with himself as to whether to ask his question, whether his curiosity would be welcomed or not, but he hadn’t been inclined to answer an unspoken question.

“Loud,” he answered, voice coarse with strain. “Just stick yourself in the middle of a crowd of people all talking at once. Then imagine them not shutting up. Ever.”

Out of the corner of his eye he saw M’Benga stop waving the sensor around, his head dropping, presumably to read whatever results he’d gathered. “And we already determined that you pick up on the issues of pain and discomfort, so what about feelings?”

“Like happy, sad, horny as hell?”

M’Benga snorted. “If you want to put it that way, yes.”

He sighed and dropped his head to look at M’Benga. “Stick a tick in that box too then.”

“Let me know if you start being able to levitate objects because that’s all I need for gin.”

He snorted, glad for M’Benga’s good humor being that bright spot in the middle of a stormy sea. “Did you find what you wanted?” he asked, nodding at the PADD in M’Benga’s hand.

M’Benga shrugged and switched the PADD off. “You can say I told you so if it makes you feel any better.”

“I’ll let you have that one for free,” he replied, sitting himself back up again.

M’Benga made a move towards the door. “Is there anything I can do? Anything you need?”

Leonard gave the offer some thought before finally shaking his head. It wasn’t as if he knew himself, even if the option for painkillers flashed through his head before any other thought. He let that one go, knowing that once he started he would likely not be able to stop, and he’d rather hold on, keeping some awareness of everything that was happening. “I’ll deal for now, but thanks.”

M’Benga smiled and nodded. “I’ll just get back to work then. I’m guessing I can discharge Collinson and Raylin now their monitoring period is up?”

“Yeah, thanks.” He suspected M’Benga already knew that Leonard had made sure there was nothing else wrong with the two engineers, but he was glad that M’Benga was trying for normalcy.

When his office door drifted shut his mind turned back to Coburn, to the replay he got of the ship’s ill-fated maiden voyage and Coburn’s reactions. He pulled one of the PADD’s across his desk and brought up Coburn’s medical records. While there was nothing startling in her physical records for the last two years they’d been on this mission, there were so many entries between the Narada and the day the newly repaired _Enterprise_ left space dock. After the physical injuries healed, there were the psych sessions that nearly ended her career. He shouldn’t have been surprised to see Jim’s name being referred to by Starfleet’s psych department as interfering, of offering her a position.

He read his own notes though, staring back at him in plain text attached to her records when, as the new CMO, he’d been sent the files of the incoming crew before the ship had even been fully operational again. Notes that he’d made about how the Lieutenant would need monitoring to determine if she was fully fit for service onboard the ship that she intrinsically associated with her loss. That caution should be adhered to in reference to her scars, about how those scars needed to remain in situ no matter what. Notes he’d seen fit to ensure flashed up on screen the minute anyone looked at her records. Had they bothered to do so, that was.

The PADD clattered as it hit the surface of his desk and he stared at it in some veiled hope that the words would change. Not that they did, or would. He swallowed hard as he pulled the PADD back towards him, starting to think of what words would be needed to fill in what had happened, and his recommendations for future handling. _I screwed up_ wasn’t going to cut it. For a brief moment he wondered if he could heal psychological trauma as easily as he could the physical, but when he concentrated on Coburn there was seemingly nothing wrong that he could fix.

It took him longer than it would normally to update her records, as he chose each word and phrase carefully, keeping the bio scans in front of him on another PADD so that he wouldn’t drift into what he’d known and felt. He left it to the physical, things that could be proven, filled out the psych eval with as much as he could, and left it unfinished, waiting to see what Coburn’s reaction would be once she woke up again. He’d pulled up his personal log though, filled in all those gaps the official records contained, ready to copy them straight over. All ready to admit that he got it wrong.

By the time he finished, he felt Coburn stirring, her thoughts this time were slow to form as he focused on her. There was the moment of confusion still, but it quickly faded into comprehension, of understanding of what had gone on. The expected panic didn’t come this time. There was still loss there, but it was drowned out by a feeling of embarrassment and shame. He was easing himself out of his seat when the comm on his desk chimed. Kinsella’s voice responding to his greeting.

He took the steps into his sickbay feeling like he was ready to drop under everything, but he forced his back to straighten. Raylin and Collinson’s beds were empty, the equipment reset, ready for whoever needed them next. By the time he stepped up to Coburn’s biobed, her eyes were open, but she averted her gaze when he looked at her. He nodded to Kinsella who smiled at Coburn before stepping away.

“How are you feeling?” he asked, hoping the answer would be more positive this time.

When she cradled her injured arm to her chest, he had to check to make sure that she felt no pain, but there was nothing, no phantom pain or bad memories, just a calm detachment that set off warning bells.

“I feel fine, thank you Dr McCoy.” Her voice was quiet, but steady.

“Do you have any concerns or worries?”

“No.” Her answer was quick, but he couldn’t detect any falsehood. He entered her responses into her file, noted down the readings from the biobed sensors.

“I wanted to apologize for before,” she said after a protracted silence.

“It’s okay. Believe me, you’re a saint in comparison to a lot of people I see.” He forced a smile onto his face in the hope that it would ease the guilt that she shouldn’t have had to carry. “Is there anything you’d like to talk about, any questions?”

Coburn shook her head. “Nothing I haven’t spoken about a million times before.” Leonard just got a glimpse of some of those psych sessions as she tried to push back the memories. “I feel fine too, honest.”

He smiled again and nodded. “It’s okay, I believe you. Did you want to discuss anything about what happened down on at the station?”

She shook her head again. “Is everyone okay?”

McCoy glanced briefly over his shoulder at the empty biobeds. “Just three injuries, and you’re the last to leave. If you feel up to it, I’m happy to let you go to your quarters to rest.”

“I’m fine, Sir. I’d like to leave.”

The eagerness of her words had him pausing, but her mind was practically a blank canvas and there were no emotions he could pin down, and that bothered him more than he’d care to admit. “You share your quarters with Lieutenant Keller?”

“Yes sir.”

“I’m going to let her know that I’m sending you to quarters to rest. I’m signing you off duty until beta shift tomorrow at the earliest, and that’s dependent on a check-up in the morning. If you have any concerns at all, let myself or one of the medical staff know. We’re here to help.”

“Yes Sir, thank you.”

He stepped back to allow her to get off the bed, following her progress until the doors of sickbay hid her from view. Even then he tried to concentrate on her as she walked back to her quarters, that calm vacant mind chilling him. He quickly sent a comm to Coburn’s roommate before retreating back to his office. Half way there he stopped, detouring far enough to grab a vial of sedative from the pharmacy.

He sat back down at his desk, staring at the clear liquid in the vial while the thoughts of the crew swarmed around him. He was so tired, physically and mentally that just an hour or two of peace, rest, felt like an oasis. Before he could change his mind, he pulled out a hypospray from the drawer of his desk and loaded the cartridge of sedative. He dialed down the dose, just enough for an hour or two. Just enough time to get himself on a more even keel before Jim was due back on board. Before he had to have that conversation.

The hypospray hissed when he pressed it against the inside of his wrist. He had enough time to place it back in his drawer and wonder if his new-found abilities would even let the sedative work, before he started to feel the effects. The noisy world around him dulled and he dropped his head onto his folded arms in relief.


	10. Chapter 10

*******

 

Jim’s hand on his shoulder brought him back to consciousness with a roar of noise that made him feel like he was under a waterfall. Sadness, grief, exhaustion. There were snippets of conversation moving so quickly that he didn’t even try to grasp anything, until M’Benga’s voice had him reaching out, an attempt to make sense of what he thought he caught.

And as soon as he focused, he regretted it a moment later. Coburn. He wondered if he was projecting his own thoughts or someone else’s among the crew, a hypothesis of what had happened, but however he looked at it, images and senses were floating through his head in full-color playback in an echo of the dead. Coburn’s thoughts and motivations were all laid out for him, the way she’d sat calmly on her bunk and looked at her life. He knew exactly how hollow she’d felt since the Narada, how everything came back to how this wasn’t a life she’d chosen for herself alone, but a journey for _them_.

Leonard swallowed thickly as he took in all the options she’d considered, right down to taking something from sickbay. He saw her quarters through her eyes as she tried to find something that meant she wouldn’t have to face another person, something that would work quickly enough to make sure her roommate was going to be too late to do anything. He felt sick when he realized the moment she’d settled on her roommate’s antique letter opener.

“You okay?”

He started at Jim’s voice, the memory or made-up scenario, whatever the hell it was faded away bring him back to his office, back to the torrent of voices and feelings, Jim’s grip tightening on his shoulder. Leonard blinked, trying to find what was real and what wasn’t.

“Bones?”

“I killed her.” It was a whisper, barely audible, muffled by the way his head was still resting against his arms laid on his desk. But Jim must have heard, his posture stiffening, his fingernails digging into the tissue of Leonard’s shoulder, pinpoint bruises healing and dissipating the minute Jim let go.

“What are you talking about?”

Leonard moved just enough so he could prop his head up on his palms, his fingernails digging into his scalp. “She was just so sad, living each day in some kind of daze hoping the next one would be better. When she came up from the surface everything was laid out bare. She hoped she was going to die because of the explosion. In the old scar she had I could see everything from how it happened, to how it was her constant reminder of that day. I could have left it, would have if I’d bothered to read her file, but I didn’t. She hated that she woke up. She was distraught when she realized the scar was gone. Despite everything it signified, she’d considered it her last connection to her fiancé.”

“God Bones no, please tell me you didn’t?”

He forced himself to look at Jim, hoping to see that the riot of emotion in his mind wasn’t playing out in his expressions too. “I didn’t think. I just thought I could make it easier for her to face the day if she didn’t have that scar as a reminder. I didn’t know she would kill herself.”

Jim closed his eyes, and on his release of breath McCoy was practically overwhelmed with relief. It was only then that Leonard realized what he’d said, what Jim had thought when he said he had killed Coburn. His eyes widened and he shook his head enough to make himself feel faint.

“Not like that. I couldn’t… not like Dorsey did. Jim?”

His hand reached out to wrap around Jim’s wrist where he was using it to rest his weight on the desk, a silent plea to be believed. Jim’s fingers clenched into a fist, and Leonard loosened his grip, until he reluctantly pulled his hand back. The rejection stung, and when Jim’s other hand squeezed his shoulder before dropping away, a chill suddenly swept through Leonard’s body.

“What was I supposed to think, Bones?” he said sadly, perching himself on the corner of the desk with his back to Leonard.

Leonard stared at the stiff back, trying to separate Jim’s thoughts from everyone else’s and he wished he hadn’t when Jim replayed their conversation of a few days earlier. Of how Leonard had wondered if Dorsey had been turned so far from what he had been in order to kill under the guise of ending suffering. Leonard didn’t say anything. Couldn’t.

“Can you see into the future now? Did you know she would do something like that?”

Jim’s voice was flat. His mind however was awash with accusations that Leonard hadn’t kept him in the loop, hadn’t spoken to him when things started developing more, but underneath it all, he read Jim’s own guilt at bringing the Lieutenant on board.

Leonard shook his head, slowly this time in the hopes his vision wouldn’t white out again. “No. I knew she wasn’t right though, but she was uncomfortable in sickbay, didn’t want to talk about it, so I thought she might get some peace in her quarters.” He swallowed hard. “But I… I think I can see into the past.”

Jim’s back tensed more and he slipped from the desk and paced across the room before he turned back. “Which means?”

Leonard closed his eyes and sighed. “I can see how she did it, or at least I think I can,” he said quietly. “I don’t know if that’s a mixture of images from other people coming together. What she was thinking is much clearer though. What she felt, and I wasn’t even awake at the time it happened, but I can see what she did.”

Jim walked back towards him, and dropped into the opposite chair. “Shit, Bones,” he whispered. Leonard knew immediately the moment things started to come together in Jim’s mind, still it took him by surprise when Jim’s mind went almost silent.

“You can hear everyone’s thoughts now?”

Leonard scrubbed his hand across his face before resting his head on them again, he figured it was way beyond time he started being honest. “I can’t shut them out,” he whispered, not meeting Jim’s gaze. “Thoughts, feelings, every damn ache and pain. There’s individual voices and thoughts like the entire crew is talking over the top of each other. Then there are the general feelings that echo all over the ship - sadness, tiredness.”

“M’Benga knew, didn’t he? He said you needed to talk to me, but he didn’t say why he was doing the autopsy and not you. When did it start?”

There were little staccato thoughts, as if Jim couldn’t stop thinking with each comment Leonard made, but then he’d try to stop himself. It was like the flickering of a light with nothing for Leonard to center himself on long enough to use the focus to cut out the rest of the ship. He raised his head wearily to look at the chrono. “A couple of days ago.”

Jim let his thoughts run free. Disappointment rolled off him in waves, tinges of anger coloring his thoughts, more so when he realized that the timing meant that Leonard was already at that point when Jim asked him to stop. Leonard squeezed his eyes shut when Jim started to worry about what he’d let out in his thoughts and feelings, tried to ignore when Jim’s heart rate sped up.

“It was okay at first,” he said, when Jim didn’t speak. “It was just an occasional feeling or comment so fleeting that I thought I was just imagining things. Then when I was dealing with one of the patients and I was working on seeing the injury in my mind it just clicked into place. Everything he was feeling and thinking was just there.”

He buried his head back in his hands, hoping Jim would say something aloud rather than the juxtaposition of thoughts that were running through his head. Of how he should have noticed, of what he must have thought about what Leonard would have heard, of just what he did wrong to make Leonard not talk to him. That thought was chopped off the second it popped into Jim’s head, but Leonard knew that was for his benefit rather than Jim’s.

Leonard swallowed. “I thought I could handle it at first. It was just when I was talking to someone, or focusing on them. Then it started to spread, different voices filtering in more and more until the whole ship was there, and no matter what I tried I couldn’t shut them out.”

Jim shifted in his seat, but he was keeping quiet except for the low mantra running through his head _don’t think, don’t think, don’t think_. Leonard knew then just how bad he’d screwed up. “I spoke to Spock.”

He’d been focusing so much on Jim’s virtually silent mind that he’d unconsciously turned the volume up. And with his last words there was a chink in Jim’s thoughts that let disappointment and hurt bleed through so loudly that Leonard sucked in a breath, holding it until the spots disappeared behind his eyelids. He struggled to dial it back again, and it began to overwhelm him.

“It was before it started. I’d been thinking about Dorsey and what he’d said, whether that meant something similar could happen to me.” He paused, breathing deep through the pain in his temples. The fingers he pressed there did nothing to ease.

“I thought he might know better than anyone about psi-abilities, how someone not used to them would cope, what they would have to do to temper them. But those walls Spock said needed to be built aren’t so easy to erect when you’ve spent your life not needing them.”

He forced himself to concentrate on something other than Jim’s mind, just something he could use to cut out as much of the noise as he could, settling for the way the blood pumped through the pulse point in his thumb where it rested against his scalp. It was a rhythm he could lose himself in if he just concentrated enough.

“It’s loud,” he whispered, not sure anymore if he was talking about the voices or the blood pumping through his veins.

Jim had a barely-there grasp of his emotions when he finally spoke. “Bones?”

Leonard looked at Jim for the first time since he started talking, squinting through the gray edges to his vision. Jim looked as wrecked as the thoughts that had been skipping through his head.

“Did you take something?”

He had to look away then, blinking at the surface of his desk. “It was just a sedative. I haven’t been sleeping, don’t need to look to know you’ve worked that much out. I just needed some quiet, just some nothingness that would take it away even if I didn’t feel like it when I woke up.”

Leonard kept his head buried in his hands and he tried to shut everything out. Part of the ship was crying out in grief at the lost crewmember and it mixed with his own grief and guilt. Jim’s thoughts just sat on top of it all, so clear and loud above everything else, and it hurt.

His wrists stung, the paths the metal had taken. The way skin and veins were sliced through felt magnified, as though the cuts were chasms rather than the thin precise slices. It should have faded by now. Shouldn’t have been felt at all the moment Coburn couldn’t feel anything, the moment her brain shut down permanently. He should have been awake to realize what she was doing, rather than dosing himself with anything that would take away the noise. If he’d been awake he would have known, he could have stopped her.

God he was tired.

Jim’s hand wrapped round one of his wrists, tugging softly until he finally let it fall, pressing the weight of his forehead onto his other palm. Concern washed through his thoughts, all Jim’s, and he could only guess as to what he must look like squinting against the pain.

“Please talk to me.”

He snorted, and even to his own ears it sounded like it was bordering on hysteria. He’d just said more in the last few minutes than he had since the whole damn mess started. But Jim’s plea was hard to ignore when Leonard knew he should have talked to him way before now. He was overdue for opening up.

“It’s like I’ve slit my own wrists,” he whispered, his breath hitching when Jim’s thumb started to rub softly against the inside of his wrist. “I just needed to shut all the voices out. I just thought a few hours and I could face it again, but I wasn’t there when she needed me. I would have known, I could have gotten to her before it was too late.”

He winced against the sting when Jim’s hand tightened. “Under normal circumstances you wouldn’t have known anyway.”

Leonard blinked at the wetness in his eyes that was threatening to spill. “Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have done what I did to drive her to it in the first place. I would have checked the files first, not gone all-in thinking I didn’t need to worry about allergies when there’d be nothing I’d need to administer.”

“I’m taking you off duty. I should have done it a while ago, and made you deal with this. We should have handled it better.”

Jim was right, but that didn’t make things any easier to deal with right now. “I wanted to help. I thought I could.”

Jim leaned forward, likely trying to catch the whispered words. “You look like hell,” Jim said with a weak smile.

“It hurts.” He felt relief at being able to say it, but Jim’s thoughts and concerns just ratcheted up a notch and that felt like a vice against his skull. He breathed out and it sounded like a sob. Jim was at his side in an instant, pulling him into an embrace, hugging him against his chest. Not even the drumbeat of Jim’s heart or the rush of air through his lungs could drown out the noise.

“C’mon. Up,” Jim whispered. “It’s way past time you let your staff take care of you.”

He let Jim help him to his feet, but the vertigo that came with the move was more than his abused head could take. There was a brief thought of panic flowing through his mind that came with Jim’s voice, but it was the last thing he heard, and for that he was grateful.


	11. Chapter 11

*******

 

He blinked his eyes open to the pulse of a chronic headache, the lights of sickbay and the thoughts of an entire ship. Screwing them shut again he held his breath as he tried to mentally push the thoughts away, push them back until there were no longer hundreds of voices trying to compete; or at least he tried up until he had to gasp for air. It wasn’t the first time he’d woken to it, that had been with Jim’s hand on his neck and his panic in his head as Leonard had tried and failed to keep the tears at bay with the pain of the onslaught. It hadn’t been that bad before, hadn’t been so bad since with a pretty much constant stream of strong painkillers courtesy of his medical staff. But there was only so much he could cope with before he pretty much begged to shut down completely. How he had thought that he could cope with this while trying to function as a doctor, he had no idea.

If he could make this stop he would. For a moment of quiet he’d do anything, and he wondered if that was what Dorsey had been trying to do, to cut each voice off, starting with the loudest, the ones with the most pain. He wasn’t Dorsey though. He’d find whatever worked best in his supplies and end it there and then if those thoughts arose. He had a mental checklist of which drugs in the cabinet were poisonous to humans, what dosage of analgesics would work the quickest. It would be so easy…

“How are you feeling?” Spock’s voice interrupted his thoughts.

Leonard huffed, glad that it didn’t turn into the whimper he was desperately trying to bite back. “Ask me again sometime.” His voice was hushed, hoarse and tight with pain, but he knew the Vulcan’s hearing would pick it up anyway.

“When you initially inquired about telepathic abilities in humans, I believed you to have been asking to whet a scientific curiosity. I did not comprehend that you may have been asking in order to prepare yourself. Had I known how acute the senses would be I would have endeavored to assist you more.”

Leonard uncoiled himself from his fetal position, and turned to stare at Spock while he tried to filter through all the white noise of voices and emotions, thankful when he found only a mild buzz from the Vulcan. He focused on that while he tried to build that imaginary wall Spock had spoken of. When everything else started to be muffled he sighed in relief.

“At the time I only suspected it might develop. It didn’t hurt to speak to the only telepath on the ship, even if they are half-Vulcan. No offence.”

Spock inclined his head. “I assure you, none has been taken. I was the logical choice to seek advice from.”

Leonard rubbed at the persistent pain in his forehead. “Yeah,” he muttered sarcastically, logical reasoning would of course soothe any potential hurt.

“However,” Spock said after a moment. “I was born with my abilities, and throughout my adolescence I was taught to maintain control of them. May I also remind you that I am merely a touch telepath, as such I cannot appreciate the invasion of a mind without such touch, nor can I understand what the sudden onset of such abilities would be like.”

“Do I detect curiosity, or concern?” He opened his eyes to watch the minute shift in Spock’s posture as he moved to clasp his hands behind his back. Leonard had been learning to read the Vulcan’s body language in the absence of emotional inflection, and this was tantamount to squirming. He almost smiled.

“I admit my scientific curiosity has been piqued, however I must also express some concern. The human mind was never intended to cope with such abilities, that much is clear by the brain development you have displayed. That you show no signs of any chemical or physical imbalance that would identify the trigger of such development is also of concern.”

“That old chestnut: what, how, why.” McCoy moved gingerly until he could look at the readout on the biobed display. It was all basically telling him the same thing: he was screwed and they had no idea why. He hissed and rubbed his temple when he heard Scotty’s curse echo through his head. Something to do with not being able to find the part he needed for the _Oresme_. Somewhere else, someone had indigestion. He swallowed hard against the bile. “The only correlation between myself and Dorsey is that we’re doctors, and that’s not something you can tell physically. It’s not something you’re born with, it comes through training.”

“Yet the powers you both develop allow you to heal.”

“The only way to distinguish who is a doctor and who isn’t is with personal input, by delving into someone’s mind.”

“The very power you are displaying.”

Leonard blinked as he played the possibilities and implications through his mind. “The planet’s dead, Spock.”

Spock inclined his head. “So it would seem at first glance.”

“Jim’s not going to let me go.”

“Perhaps if we argue that there is nothing to lose and everything to gain he may consent to it. You cannot go on in so much discomfort, or with the level of drugs you require to lessen that. There would be significantly fewer minds on the planet to overwhelm you.”

Leonard fixed on the one surprise in Spock’s statement. “We?” he asked as he struggled to sit up. His knuckles turned white as his hands clutched the edge of the biobed, fighting back the sudden dizziness. God, he wished he could just go to sleep and forget it all.

“I believe the Captain would hesitate to listen to your reasoning. However, I doubt he would be able to find flaws in my logic.”

Leonard huffed. “Is this a good time to mention some dreams I’ve been having?” Spock inclined his head and Leonard shrugged. “Just a planet I’ve never been to, an alien race I’ve never seen before. They know I’m there, can’t get them to stop bowing when I pass except for one or two of them that kind of look down on me.”

“Perhaps you are communicating with the race that caused this.”

“Well, if they’re down there then I have a few choice words for them. If you think Jim will listen, then I’m all for it.”

He made a move to push himself from the biobed, but his knees buckled as his feet touched the floor. There was a hand steadying him, and then nothing but a whole slew of memories, a life in seconds, the one constant throughout them all was Spock. There was life, loss, love and learning, and yet no matter what he saw, nothing compared to the loss of Vulcan. Nothing comparing to the way all those lives and minds went blank in one moment. The sense of loss was worse than those hundreds of voices swimming through his head, and he was drowning in it.

He could feel the tears running down his cheeks when the images left him to be replaced with a familiar voice and mind. Jim’s fingers were wiping away the wetness as it fell, sure tender strokes of his thumbs sweeping away Spock’s memories, leaving Jim’s pain to take over. Jim’s lips pressed against his forehead and Leonard felt his heart breaking at the thoughts running through Jim’s head.

His breathing was ragged and loud to his own ears, and he sucked in a deep breath of air. He squeezed his eyes shut, before blinking away what moisture he could. Jim was straddling his thighs where he lay resting back against the biobed. _I’m okay_ he sent, feeling Jim stiffen slightly at the intrusion in his mind, but it was easier to think than to open his mouth and hope words would come. Jim pulled back though, his eyes scanning his face to make sure those words weren’t a lie.

Spock was pale, the greenish tint to his skin far more pronounced, and his words were shaky when he finally spoke. “I apologize, Doctor. I did not realize.”

Leonard waved a hand. “S’okay. Better than landing on my face.” His words were no more than gasps.

“What happened?” Jim asked, when he finally moved far enough away, to allow Leonard to see his hovering staff. When he waved them off they didn’t go far.

“I reached out instinctively to prevent Dr McCoy from falling. In such an action I did not appreciate that such a move would so easily break through my shields and create a two-way link between us. Unfortunately, Dr McCoy was overwhelmed by my thoughts, while I found myself trapped in what he has been experiencing.”

Leonard heard Jim swallow, felt his spike of fear. “Bad?” he whispered.

Leonard snorted despite trying to hold it back. The low buzz that surrounded Spock’s thoughts rippled. “Captain, I believe it would be prudent to allow Dr McCoy to travel to the surface.”

Jim’s hand clenched around Leonard’s arm and Leonard could see the mix of anger and fear in his mind. “Dammit Spock, he’s not going to kill anyone. I’m not sending him down there.”

“My apologies Captain, that was not my reasoning. I did not mean to imply that course of action would happen, merely that in light of everything, perhaps it is time to look for an organic cause.”

Leonard knew the moment Jim caught on to what Spock was saying in his roundabout way. “You think there’s something down there?”

“It’s the only option left Jim.” Jim’s gaze swung back to him. “Hell, at least it should be quiet down there, even if I don’t find anything.” He rubbed his forehead, when Jim started warring with himself. But the insight meant he knew when Jim reached his decision.

“Fine, but you’re not going alone. They’ve got everything contained down there now, so I’ll pull the repair crews up to the ship, but I’m staying with you. Spock, I want you to monitor everything from the Bridge. I want to hear the moment you think there’s something not right.”

Even if Leonard hadn’t seen that coming, he wouldn’t have expected anything else from him. He held a hand out to Jim. “Help me up, dammit.”

They waited in silence in the transporter room until the last of the engineering teams beamed back up. Jim checked his phaser one last time before moving to stand on the pad. Leonard followed him, trying to keep that mental wall up. The steps onto the pad were an effort but he gave Jim a reassuring smile just as the familiar tingle started. When they materialized on the _Oresme_ Leonard could sense the difference immediately. Where there should have been silence, instead there was the faint hum of something. There wasn’t a thought he could grab hold of as such, he just knew there was more on the planet.

Jim must have sensed his preoccupation, because his hand was there against his elbow. “You okay?”

“Well, it’s pretty damn quiet for one, but there’s definitely something different to the last time.”

“I’m glad to say you sound better already.” And Jim was glad, if the relief running through his head was believed.

He did feel better, the weight of all those voices leaving him at least turned down the headache to something approaching bearable. The muscles he’d kept bunched up in tension for so many hours started to relax and he began to feel steady on his feet again. But the quiet allowed him for the first time to feel the pressure the growth in his brain was causing. He suddenly knew that if they didn’t succeed here, it wouldn’t matter if he stayed on the planet by himself, because he wouldn’t live long.

Leonard turned around trying to find some source to the buzz that he was feeling, but there was still nothing solid when he started to move towards the damaged end of the station. They walked in silence, their boots making the only sound either of them could hear, with the exception of Jim’s thoughts and a faint buzz that Leonard would have associated with Spock if the other man was here. He wondered if that was what a shielded mind sounded like.

They were walking through one of the more badly damaged areas of the station when things started to slot into place. The walls here were blasted straight through to the outside, the engineering teams having not bothered repairing something so badly damaged. He stopped dead when his eyes drifted outside, Jim pausing by his side.

“What is it?”

Leonard didn’t answer. He climbed over the twisted metal as he made his way outside. His boot heels crunched over dry rocks and dirt, but in his mind, his hands were pushing aside tall grasses, the likes of which he’d seen in his dreams. He walked until he met one of the pathways that meandered through the landscape, stopping there to turn and survey everything around him. He looked back towards the station, half-hidden amongst the grasses. He could see the destruction of the base, but not a single blade of grass was scorched from where the explosion must have been seated.

“What do you see?”

Leonard looked back to where Jim stood amidst the tall grass. “You don’t see it?”

Jim glanced around and shook his head. “Just the base and an arid landscape.”

“I wonder if it’s out of phase,” he muttered, staring at the familiar landscape he thought was the figment of his dreams.

“Wonder if what is? C’mon talk to me.”

He turned his attention back to Jim. “As far as I can tell it follows the same contours as the land you can see, but it’s not arid. It’s very fertile, long grasses, tall trees. That riverbed over there is flowing.” He pointed to where blue waters flowed through the landscape, able to use the pictures in Jim’s mind to know he was only seeing a wide ditch.

He startled as something sounded above him, and his eyes scanned the sky until he found the dark shape soaring high above them heading towards higher ground. “I guess you didn’t see or hear that either,” he asked.

The spread of confusion in Jim’s mind answered his question without needing a verbal response. “Any sign of civilization?”

He glanced around but didn’t see anything, but there was something he remembered from his dreams that meant he knew which way to head. He started walking, Jim pausing only a moment to speak to the ship before following. Leonard turned to him, finding it disconcerting to see him walking through the tall grass. “You might want to…”

Jim looked at him confused, but he followed when Leonard tugged him over so that he was walking on the path. Leonard paused then, Jim stopping a few paces ahead.

“What?”

He didn’t know if it was possible or not, but Leonard concentrated until he thought he had imprinted the landscape around him into his mind. It wasn’t easy sending an image rather than a word or two, but he knew when Jim saw what he did, even for the brief moment he could let Jim see it. Jim’s eyes were wide as he tried to reconcile what he’d just seen to the ‘reality’ that surrounded him.

“Trust me,” Leonard whispered when Jim’s gaze came back to look at him.

Jim nodded once, his breath coming loudly through his parted lips. _I do_

They walked in silence, or at least neither of them spoke. Jim’s thoughts were a riot of emotions and confusion. He was constantly running through scenarios and what-if’s, occasionally remembering that Leonard could hear pretty much everything. An apology would drift through his thoughts, followed by a minute of silence before he would start again. Leonard didn’t mind. Jim’s voice was the only one he could hear and after everything that had happened that was a blessing. The closer they came to the village though, the louder that underlying buzz seemed to get, making his apprehension worse. Jim must have picked up on it as his thoughts changed towards a readiness to fight, and concerns about what was ahead of them.

The village was exactly as he dreamt it, solidifying the suspicions in his mind that they weren’t just dreams. He stopped short when he saw the first of the Nidri, standing as tall as he remembered in the entrance way to its house. It dipped its head in a gesture all too familiar, and when Leonard tried to get it to speak it bowed lower. The buzzing sound became more urgent, louder and he pressed the heel of his hand to his head.

“Bones?” Jim’s touch was there on his back, his thoughts drowning out the buzz.

 _It’s okay_ he sent, casting his eyes down the street as more of the Nidri started to appear. He was looking for the one that didn’t bow, the one that each time he thought would speak it did nothing but signal the end of his dream. He spotted it at last as it came around a corner, joining the rest of the crowd that had assembled.

Jim’s confusion at Leonard’s interactions to what he couldn’t see was a constant thrum in his mind, but he was grateful that Jim didn’t question him. When he moved towards his target, Jim followed silently, and Leonard hoped Jim couldn’t walk through any of them. He stopped in front of the Nidri, that elegant head tipping down enough to look at him.

“Please show him.”

The Nidri inclined its head before it looked towards Jim. Leonard noticed no difference, only Jim’s gasp and the sudden blare from their communicators gave indication that anything had changed.

“Thank you,” he whispered. Behind him Spock’s voice was calm as it came through the comm but Leonard could hear the edge of wonder as he explained how the sensors had come alive with lifeforms, civilization and vegetation. He kept quiet until Jim had finished the comm and came to stand beside him.

“I’m Captain James T Kirk, USS _Enterprise_. I guess you’ve already met my Chief Medical Officer, Dr McCoy.”

The Nidri inclined its head again, but turned to Leonard. “He says he knows who you are. They don’t have a need for names here,” Leonard said for him, the Nidri’s voice clear in his head. “He’s a healer, just as I am.”

“Did you do this?” Leonard asked tapping a finger against the side of his head. He voiced his question for Jim’s benefit rather than his own.

The response came back to him within his head. _Your first healer suffered when your building was damaged. He was fixed. You suffered. You were fixed too._

“Did you kill him?”

The Nidri paused, as if trying to decipher the words. Leonard tried to think of what it meant to kill, enough to give the Nidri a comparison. _He attempted to take the life of another healer. That is forbidden, and he was punished._

“Is that why you healed me? Why not any of the others?”

_They were not healers._

“That’s it? That’s the only reason?”

“Bones?” Leonard held up a hand to stall Jim’s questions, knowing the one-sided conversation was not sitting comfortably with him.

_You are a healer. Only healers can have the gift._

“Well, it works differently for us. Our healers are no different from everyone else. We learn through training and experience, through knowledge not power. Can you take it away?”

_Why would you wish this?_

Leonard sighed and glanced at Jim who looked like he wanted nothing better than to listen in. He switched to an internal response.

_Our anatomies are different. The human brain is not designed for telepathic abilities, the expansion in my brain that you triggered to allow this to happen is killing me. I’m only standing here right now because I have taken enough chemicals to take away the pain. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful you brought me back from the dead, but if you send me away I won’t be alive much longer. What you did will take my life, no matter how unintentional you meant it to be. So please, can you take this away?_

The Nidri was quiet, his black eyes seemed to drill straight through him, and Leonard itched with the need to break the stare.

“Bones?”

Jim’s soft-hushed voice brought the attention of both of them to him. “It’s okay, Jim.”

“What’s going on?”

Leonard turned back to the Nidri. _Please. I appreciate that you gave this gift to me, and I thank you for the consideration, but I need to return it. You’re a healer, would you let someone, another healer die if you could prevent it?_

The Nidri turned his head between both men, before raising a hand, and Leonard sighed in relief as he heard the alien’s acceptance. Jim took a step forward when the Nidri’s long fingers reached out to him.

 _It’s okay,_ he sent, just before icy cold fingers touched his forehead. Just before everything went black.


	12. Chapter 12

*******

 

Leonard had stayed on the bridge long enough to watch a browny-gray colored Bragan IV shrink on the screen and finally disappear in a flash of light as the _Enterprise_ shot into warp. None of the greens and blues he’d seen from the observation deck were evident now that the Nidri had seen fit to relieve him of their ‘gift’. The planet, and its occupants, were left in the hands of the _Excalibur_ , and he was glad of it. The _Excalibur_ could fix the _Oresme_ station, and all the moral implications that brought with it, Leonard was done worrying over Starfleet’s choices in research, and no matter what happened it would seem the locals could ignore it.

As for the Nidri, well, he could hold a grudge with the best of them, but in the end, the whole damn mess had come about because they’d tried to help and prevent anyone else from dying after the explosion. As a healer, he couldn’t deny he would have tried the same, just maybe he’d have stuck around a bit to make sure he hadn’t made things worse.

Not that the Nidri stayed around for anyone to talk with about anything. The way Jim told it, as soon as he hit the ground everything, every building and blade of grass disappeared from sight and sensor. But whatever they did to him had worked. Even while he was out, M’Benga had determined that everything was back to normal. Waking up came with a bolt of déjà-vu, and he hated the fact that coming to in his own sickbay had become all too familiar. He was greeted with silence. No voices, no thoughts. There were no bumped toes or cut fingers that he could sense, and the pressure in his head was gone. All that was left was Jim’s hand in his. That was all he needed.

His first job once M’Benga had cleared him for duty was one hell of a debrief with Starfleet Command. He knew Starfleet had a whole set of security protocols when it came to contact with telepathic races, but he could have done without the three-hour grilling about whether the Nidri posed a threat to the Federation, whether they could have gotten the codes to Earth’s security grid… _ad nauseum_.

Leonard was glad of Jim’s presence when he diverted most of the questions about Nidri technology. In Leonard’s eyes, the Nidri didn’t have a care about whether the Federation had a science post on their planet or not, seeing as though not even catastrophic failure of the station put a dent in their world. The only interference the Nidri had was to try to help, and he doubted they’d be trying that again any time soon. From what he’d been able to pick up, the Nidri had some technology on par with the Federation, but they had no desire to fashion anything more, happy as they were with their lot. Leonard didn’t need to be telepathic to work out that Starfleet weren’t convinced, and he wouldn’t be surprised if the _Excalibur_ ended up being one of the last ships to orbit Bragan IV.

With Bragan IV behind them, and those three weeks of shore leave ahead, Leonard had disappeared to his office in sickbay. The unfinished reports he’d had stacked on the edge of his desk all those days ago when they’d first received the orders to head to Bragan IV had lessened somewhat, but there were still those requisitions and repairs to compile and sign off on. They’d greeted him when his office door slid open, but he pushed them aside to complete the one report he needed to, the one that would explain away all his failures of the last week. He’d wondered if the discovery of a previously unknown race and civilization would be enough to lessen the rap on the knuckles he’d get for failing in his duty to report his own state of health.

He finally finished that report an hour after the end of his shift, after he’d closed himself off from the rest of sickbay in a bid to stop avoiding it. Jim would need to read it first and that was what worried Leonard the most, how he’d react to the changes Leonard had gone through that he hadn’t told him about. He’d tried to keep his report neutral; a statement of fact, untainted by words on the thought processes he’d taken that could justify each of his indiscretions. Jim would be able to read through that language to the truth behind it. He always had been able to do that. That was why the report was sitting on his PADD, ready to be sent when Leonard found enough courage to do so. That wasn’t tonight.

He signed off on the list of supplies that Chapel had put together, adding them to his own list that needed to be sent out so that Starfleet would make the delivery in time for the ship’s departure from Starbase 6. Just before he could hit send, the chime to his office door sounded, bringing his eyes to the chrono he sighed at the lateness. He wasn’t expecting Jim to be on the other side, not after everything that had happened. “Come.”

The door slid open to admit the First Officer. Spock paused on the threshold, arms clasped behind his back. “My apologies Doctor, I do not mean to interrupt.”

Leonard leaned back in his chair, setting the stylus on his desk. He waved Spock in. “I could do with the break. What can I do for you?”

Spock moved further into the office, the door sliding shut behind him, until he stood awkwardly, his apparent discomfort making the back of Leonard’s neck itch. He scratched at it before waving a hand to the empty chair. “Knock yourself out.”

Spock paused briefly with his hand on the chair back, before either choosing to ignore the idiom or working out its meaning. He sat stiffly, back ramrod straight and gaze diverted. All Leonard could do was wait him out.

“Forgive my intrusion, and please be aware that I will not take offence should you chose not to converse with me, but I wished to talk to you about what happened between us.”

It was one of those moments he wished he could take a look inside the Vulcan’s mind to work out his reasons for asking, but then remaining oblivious seemed the safest option, if only he could say he was. The brief touch on Spock’s unguarded mind had given him so much to think about, nothing of which he would ever dare ask about.

“Nothing to forgive Spock,” he said, sighing. “I’ll be glad to help.” It startled him how much truth there was in that statement.

Spock nodded. “I wished to offer an apology, I failed to prevent our minds from merging.”

Leonard held up a hand. “I think I already said there was nothing to forgive when you first brought it up, that’s still true now. If anything it’s me that should be apologizing for putting you through the pain and the unwanted intrusion.”

Spock shook his head minutely. “As you say, there is nothing to forgive. I also wished to reassure you that I was not able to pick up any of your own thoughts, the discomfort you were feeling at the time was all-consuming. However, if I am not being presumptuous, I would like to ask what you experienced of my thoughts. Your reaction to them was… strong.”

Leonard leaned forward, resting his elbows on his desk, pressing his mouth to his clenched hands. How did you tell someone you knew everything from the fist fight at school and what years of prejudice felt like, right to their intimate relationships and the soul-destroying death of so many kin? Leonard prided himself on his honesty, and maybe he hadn’t been as open to Jim as he should have been this last week, but he could at least say he had not lied.

“I’d like to say I live by the old physician motto of do no harm, but sometimes having to be a soldier too is inevitable in Starfleet. What I do fully subscribe to is patient confidentiality. I want you to know that.” He waited until Spock tilted his head in acknowledgment before continuing. He dropped his hands to his desk as he spoke. “I can only assume that what I was able to pick up from you through touch was amplified by your own touch telepathy resulting in more memories and thoughts being transferred than I experienced with anyone else.”

“It is a reasonable hypothesis.”

Leonard sighed. “Yeah I thought it would be,” he muttered, before he spoke up. “You should know that I had no idea what was happening, and no clue how to stop it. Those telepathic powers didn’t come with a manual and I had no idea how to control them.”

“I understand, and would have expected nothing more.”

Spock’s easy acceptance wasn’t helping him find the words he needed to say, and he ran a hand through his hair in frustration before deciding to just say it. “I saw everything. It was tainted by your own perception, whether through age or knowledge, but from one second to the next it was just there; a life experience shared.”

When Spock didn’t say a word, Leonard looked for something else to say that might make him believe him. “Your planet was beautiful,” he said softly. “The way the warm wind would whistle a tune as it blew through the towers, or the strength of the sunsets on a cooler day. I understand that bond Vulcans share, and when the planet was lost… god, I don’t know how you managed to function, let alone save Earth.”

Leonard remembered the darkness, the cries of thousands of minds until they ended abruptly, the sudden emptiness that came with so much loss. He blinked back the wetness in his eyes, respect for the man sitting in front of him kept him from showing his inherited pain. It wasn’t his planet, no matter how deeply the shared feelings and memories cut.

“I.” Spock paused. “I did not mean to burden you with such knowledge.”

There was little left of the strong confident voice he was used to hearing when Spock spoke, and Leonard snorted. “God man, I’ve just told you I know your entire life and experiences because I couldn’t control myself, how can you turn that around and make it your fault?”

Spock straightened his back. “As you have already said, you did not have enough experience to prevent the connection from forming. I however did, and yet failed to maintain my shields. The price of my failure is the loss of my privacy.”

Leonard rubbed his hands over his face. “Spock, I am in no way holding you responsible for anything, and I can only say how sorry I am that this happened. I can promise you with everything I have or am, that nothing will ever be said about anything I’ve been privy to.”

“That may not be something you can control, however I appreciate your sincerity. If you will excuse me,” he said, standing, “I have a dinner engagement to meet.”

Leonard watched him turn, his back stiff and movements sharp. His mind brought up a memory of Spock’s fears, and he couldn’t let it go. “Spock.”

The Vulcan paused before his proximity could trigger the doors and turned to face him, his gaze locked on a spot somewhere over Leonard’s shoulder. “I know you never truly believed it, always worried about humans being able to lie. And I may have only seen her through your eyes, but your mother… well, when she said she was proud of you, she meant it, every damn time. Believe that, coming from one human about another.”

Spock’s gaze flickered to his.

“If you ever want to talk to someone that understands, my door will always be open.”

“I may, one day, take you up on your offer,” Spock finally said. His gaze flicked to the door before returning to Leonard’s. “Thank you.”

He nodded. “Goodnight Spock.”

“Goodnight Doctor.” With his last words, Spock walked out of his office, the doors closing until there was just the sound of the ship in the background. After a rough start he was beginning to see how Jim could put so much faith in his First Officer, it was something he had been learning to do too. Maybe one day they’d be something he could call friends.

He sighed, picking the PADD back up to send off the report to Jim. The comm on his desk chimed only a few minutes after he’d hit send.

“Hey Bones.”

“Jim.”

“You, er, are you heading out of there any time soon?”

Leonard felt his heart thud solidly in his chest, his mind thrown back to all those days ago when Jim had asked a similar question. When Leonard had turned Jim down, only to realize almost too late what he was letting slip through his fingers. Leonard scratched the pad of his finger against the fabric of his pants when he felt it tingle against the memory of that brief touch against Jim’s bare shoulder.

“Yeah, I’m about ready to call it quits. You eaten?”

“No, not yet.” Jim’s voice brightened, and Leonard felt a twinge of guilt that he could have ever made a man such as Jim feel that insecure. Their relationship should have been a point to gain strength from, not to fear.

“I’ll grab something from the mess and bring it up to our quarters then. Any preferences?”

Leonard swore he could feel Jim shrug, a rustle of fabric that could have been anything, but somehow he just knew. He rubbed a hand across his forehead, and couldn’t quite dampen down the fear that the Nidri had left something behind.

“Whatever looks good is fine. I’d ask you to not pile the plate up with green stuff, but that’s a battle I doubt I’d win.”

Leonard smiled. “I thought Jim Kirk didn’t believe in no-win scenarios?” he teased.

“Maybe I don’t mind losing when it’s to you, Bones.”

His tone was teasing, but Leonard’s breath stuttered at what the words ultimately said. “I’ll be there soon, just give me a couple of minutes to finish here and I’ll sign off.”

He stacked the PADDs back up, straightened his desk and stood up. His spine cracked when he twisted his hips, sighing in relief when the ache that had sat in the base of his back all day dissipated.

The ship’s corridors were relatively quiet, the shift changes having happened a couple of hours previously, and the mess hall was almost as sparsely populated. There were a few pockets of people here and there, conversations were a hum, the occasional bark of laughter ringing out, and he nodded to Lieutenant Hudson as she passed him. She and the remaining crew of the _Oresme_ were hitching a ride to Starbase 6.

Leonard knew most of the crew had been unaffected by what had gone on since they arrived at Bragan IV, other than having their leave delayed. He hoped there would be no more detours. He smiled at Maggie as she handed him an empty tray. He’d always had a soft-spot for the older woman, it helped that she shared his home state and made a mean pie.

“Haven’t seen you around for quite a while.”

Her tone was a mix of fondness and admonishment, and Leonard couldn’t help the sheepish smile. “Been a hell of a few days,” he said.

“I just hear the ship's gossip round here and I don’t always pay attention to the mutterings of the kids, but I haven’t see the Captain much either.”

Leonard shrugged. “Like I said, been a hell of a few days. But don’t worry, I’m collecting for him too.”

Maggie smiled and held up a finger before turning and disappearing into the main kitchen. Leonard watched her go, but refrained from moving, knowing better than to risk a dressing down from the head steward. She returned a few minutes later with a tray holding two covered dinner plates, a small basket of bread and two more smaller covered plates. He couldn’t see what they contained, but he couldn’t deny they smelled good.

“Here,” she said. “You look like these are needed.”

Leonard frowned. “What is it?”

Maggie smiled. “A touch of home. Now go on. Get.”

Leonard chuckled as he took the tray she held out to him. “Yes ma’am.”

Moments later he was standing outside their quarters and the knot in his stomach was no longer that of hunger. It had been weeks since they’d sat down and had a meal together, had enough time to eat, and to talk. Not about things that had gone wrong, nor about work, but those conversations that made them laugh at old memories and lean towards one another as they bitched and moaned at the lack of fact in those supposed space-saga’s they forced themselves to watch.

He sighed and straightened up, shaking off his apprehension and remembering that promise he made to make things right. He’d been granted a second, third even, chance to do something about it, he might not get that again. He balanced the tray with one hand and keyed in his code with the other. Jim was sat on the couch, and he smiled as he looked up, placing his PADD on the low table as he stood up. Leonard placed the tray on the dining table and finally lifted the lids on his curiosity.

“Smells good,” Jim said as he stepped closer, a hand trailing along Leonard’s back as he headed to his seat.

Leonard had found Jim’s touch was never too far from his skin since they’d beamed back from the surface. A hand to his back, a clap on his shoulder, a foot pressed to his calf while in bed. He guessed it was Jim’s way of convincing himself he was real, warm… alive. Leonard had done similar in the past with those close calls that Jim seemed to be able to survive.

He smiled slightly as he placed Jim’s steak in front of him, toeing his boots off before joining him at the table. They ate in silence, but it wasn’t uncomfortable, and when the final spoonful of pie slipped down, Leonard leaned back in his chair with a contented sigh. Jim mirrored his pose shortly after. Moments like these he could have lost, he realized as he breathed deep. He couldn’t help but think they were still there to lose if he didn’t stop taking things, taking Jim, for granted.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, his gaze stuck to the ceiling.

“For what?” Jim asked. His voice was soft, but Leonard couldn’t detect any hint of confusion. He got the sense that Jim was expecting him to utter those words again, but was ready to listen to his reasons for saying them this time.

“For so many things I should have apologized for before now. And I should have said it earlier. Should have said it before I almost couldn’t.”

“Bones…”

“No Jim,” he interrupted, dropping his head until he could face Jim. “I never even noticed. How could I not notice?”

He ran a hand through his hair and tugged at the strands. “Jocelyn always said I was single-minded. That once I got my head into something I never let it go, just buried deeper into it until that was all I could see. I never even noticed she was looking for comfort elsewhere, or that she’d been reaching out until she’d packed her bags.”

Jim reached out a hand and Leonard tangled his fingers with Jim’s over the table. “I didn’t realize I’d closed myself off, or that you were reaching out, until just before Bragan IV. And then I did finally get a clue and I promised myself I’d fix it once shore leave came about. I shouldn’t have waited.” His voice trailed to a whisper, and he felt Jim’s grip tighten.

“You want to know what I thought about before the lights went out on the _Oresme_?”

Jim sucked in a breath and shook his head. But Leonard was going to tell him anyway. “The last thing I thought was how sorry I was, how much of a goddamn stupid fool I was to not say something as soon as I realized.”

Leonard stood from his seat and dropped to his knees in front of Jim. His hands made an aborted move to cup Jim’s face, but he clenched his fingers and rested them on Jim’s hips instead.

“I’m sorry I took us for granted,” he said, voiced hushed and rough. “I’m sorry I didn’t have any idea how much I’d pulled away and how I hurt you. I’m sorry you had to go through me leaving. I’m sorry I didn’t keep my promise and talk to you when things started to change. And I’m sorry, because I know what we promised when we got into this, but I don’t want the ship to come first all the time.”

Jim shuffled forward in his chair, pulling Leonard into the embrace of his legs and closer until he could wrap his arms around Leonard's shoulders. Leonard pressed his face into Jim’s chest, and unclenching his fingers from Jim’s shirt, he wrapped his own arms round Jim’s middle.

“I thought…” Jim’s voice sounded choked, and he trailed off.

“Thought what?” Leonard asked, his voice muffled against Jim’s shirt, from where he was refusing to move.

“I thought you were sorry, that it wasn’t working and you’d had enough. God knows I spent enough time walking away myself, trying to find explanations, asking you for promises I knew you couldn’t make. I shouldn’t have done that, and I’m sorry too.”

Leonard shuffled enough for Jim to loosen his hold, and he pulled back enough to take Jim’s face in his palms, no hesitation this time. “I will never have enough of you. That’s one promise I’ll never break.”

He watched Jim blink, a riot of emotion flickering in those perfect blue depths. And then Jim surged forward, there was a brief flash of pain as Jim’s teeth caught his lip when he pressed too hard, too clumsy, but the sting faded as they found their rhythm. Leonard couldn’t remember the last time they did this, too many weeks, and too many chaotic days ago, and he cursed himself all over again for being the damned fool he was.

He tangled his hands in Jim’s hair and purposely slowed their pace, pressing soft kisses against Jim’s lips before he pulled away. His knees groaned in protest as he rose to his feet. Jim’s cheeks were flushed, his lips glistening red. And Leonard felt that twinge of regret slither through him before he reminded himself that he hadn’t been too late.

He backed up a step and held out his hand. Jim hesitated for a brief moment, but his hand was warm, his grip solid as he rose to his feet. Jim’s free hand came around him, burrowing under Leonard’s shirts until he could press his palm to his back. Leonard returned the favor, edging his fingers under the waistline of Jim’s pants, his fingertips lightly teasing Jim’s skin.

“I missed you.” Jim’s breath was hot against the skin of his neck with his whispered words, and Leonard pressed his nose into Jim’s hair and breathed deep.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. He’d say it constantly until he knew Jim believed him, would keep on until he finally thought he’d made it up to him.

“Don’t.” Jim’s admonishment came with a tightening of his arms. “We’re okay.”

Leonard’s nails scratched at Jim’s scalp, tangling the soft strands around his fingers. “Yeah, we’re okay.”

He felt Jim’s lips press against his neck. “Show me.”

His words were soft, almost hesitant, as if asking for something like that was opening himself up for rejection. Leonard hated making someone like Jim doubt himself, and if he could take it all back he would do. He had another apology on the tip of his tongue, but kept it unspoken this time. The hand he’d tangled in Jim’s hair came round to cup Jim’s face, stubble scratching against his palm as he pressed his lips to Jim’s. Leonard kept it as soft caresses, until Jim sighed and pressed his body closer.

It was always so easy getting lost in this, the universe drifted past outside the ship and whatever the day had wrought would fade out. Leonard would pull Jim ever closer for as long as it took to make things right, and if he never did, if Jim didn’t turn away from him then he could deal with that.

He reluctantly untangled his fingers from Jim’s shirts, tugging at the hems to get Jim to just stop, _don’t stop_ , and step back. With a bite to Jim’s bottom lip, Leonard pulled away, tugging Jim’s shirts off, discarding them somewhere behind him to find later. When Jim’s hands caught in his own shirt, Leonard tugged them off too, pausing to take in Jim’s smile. He couldn’t remember when he’d last seen Jim smile, not with that crinkle at the sides of his eyes. Jim’s smile turned a little lopsided as he raised an eyebrow in question, and Leonard huffed out a breath before pulling Jim to him.

Leonard let his passion for Jim come through, to _show_ him what he felt. Jim didn’t let him have all the action, giving back in return as much as he could with Leonard’s tongue mapping the contours of his mouth and his hands digging bruises into Jim’s hips.

“Bones…”

Jim’s hands squeezed, and Leonard was too far gone to deny him anything. Familiarity drew Leonard to that spot just under Jim’s ear, light kisses, soft nips, and gentle suction resulted in a moan from Jim and his nails scraping across Leonard’s shoulders. His deft fingers eased the button of Jim’s pants open, pushing the zipper down with the pad of his thumb so that the tip of his nail teased the skin underneath.

Jim sucked in a harsh breath as Leonard’s lips finally pulled away from his neck, and Leonard had to steady himself with a step back as Jim pushed into him, lips crushing his. He kissed back with everything he had, and when Jim finally stepped away and towards the bed, Leonard could feel the tingle, the swell of his lips even before he licked them.

Jim’s hot gaze followed the tip of his tongue as it swept across his bottom lip, but he didn’t stop his backwards walk. When Jim smirked Leonard followed him, unbuttoning his own pants. He let them fall from his hips, pushing his briefs down and kicking them off. Jim tackled him as he rounded the corner to the sleeping area, and Leonard’s breath rushed out of his lungs as they hit the bed, Jim’s arm digging into his ribs. The _oof_ was a token complaint, Leonard freeing his arms only to wrap them around Jim, bringing them back together, this time without the barrier of clothing.

Leonard could have stayed there, just like that, too long without Jim this close was enough to show him just how much he’d walled himself off. Jim must have sensed his preoccupation because suddenly Leonard found himself on his back with Jim smiling down at him, a challenge in his eyes.

They fought for the upper hand, each struggle for control wringing breathy moans through open-mouthed kisses. The grin gave him away, but Leonard knew Jim had let him win when he rolled Jim onto his back beneath him. Leonard kissed him briefly, a quick press of his lips, pulling back before Jim could react. He bent down and pressed a kiss to Jim’s sternum, dragging his lips over the warm skin, downward.

His hands rubbed circles on Jim’s sides, feeling muscles bunch under his palms as his mouth inched lower. One of Jim’s hands buried in Leonard’s hair, the sharp tug made him hiss but it was something he could feel that was real, that was his pain and not someone else’s for a change and he couldn’t bite back his moan. Jim loosened his grip but his hand didn’t stray, fingertips pressing into Leonard’s scalp as his teeth nipped at Jim’s navel.

Leonard’s hand settled on Jim’s hip as he dipped lower, the fingers tightening their hold in anticipation as he took Jim in, hot and hard against his tongue. Above him, Jim’s breath stuttered on an inhale, and Leonard had to press down to stop Jim’s hips from pushing upwards. The feeling of power and control that he could do this, that Jim would let him take him apart never stopped being a rush, making his own arousal burn under his skin. His mouth teased, never concentrating on one act long enough to allow Jim to drift, and Leonard reveled in the low noises Jim made each time he changed from teeth to tongue, from deep to shallow. The tugging of his hair became more persistent, and Jim’s sigh of frustration had Leonard reluctantly pulling back to look down at him.

Jim’s eyes shone in the low light, pupils blown wide. His lips were red from either his tongue or the bite of his teeth, Leonard didn’t really care which because it didn’t change the fact that his heart clenched at the sight Jim made against the white of the bedclothes. Jim pushed him back to his knees before scrambling to his own, moving forward until he was practically sat on Leonard’s lap. Their bodies pressed together perfectly and Leonard’s mouth opened on a moan before Jim took advantage and slipped his tongue between his parted lips. He pressed one hand to Jim’s back to steady him as the other took them both in a warm grasp and started to move, slow and fast, tight and loose.

Jim’s hands were locked on his shoulder as leaned backwards to see what Leonard’s hand was doing, harsh pants coming from saliva-wet lips. Leonard let the hand on Jim’s back take Jim’s weight while he tightened his grip, twists of his wrist and the press of his thumb made both of them gasp and moan. Jim tilted his head back then, leaving the long column of his neck exposed and it was an invitation Leonard wasn’t going to pass on. He kissed his way up and down Jim’s neck, from one side to the other, before he scraped his teeth against the underside of Jim’s chin, downwards until he could suck a mark into the pale skin at the base of his neck, and again above his heart. Jim’s fingers tightened against his shoulders, the strong muscles in the thighs pressed tight to Leonard’s own bunched and strained. Under the palm that was pressed flat to Jim’s back, Leonard could feel Jim’s body tighten, until he finally shuddered under his release, gasping breaths loud in the silence of their room.

Jim leaned forward again then, his hands peeling away from Leonard’s shoulders to wrap around his neck, smashing his lips to Leonard’s in a bruising kiss. It was easy then to let the tension in his own body go, a tightening of his fingers, a thumb pressed just to the right spot, and Jim’s tongue wrapped around his own. Leonard’s hand lightly stroked them both as his breaths came in harsh pants against Jim’s lips. Jim held on tightly, and when the rush finally died down Leonard could feel his knees protesting and his feet cramping. He didn’t try to move, just let the feel of Jim’s heart beating against his own chest calm him further and buried his nose against Jim’s neck, closed his eyes and breathed deep.

With Jim warm and real in his arms, and his aches and pains his own, he finally realized what he’d been pushing away, and what he could have lost. Jim could have turned his back and walked away long before the mess on Bragan IV even began and Leonard couldn’t help but wonder why he hadn’t. He hoped it was because Jim hadn’t wanted to let him go, and not because he thought the distance was what Leonard wanted. He sucked in a long breath and held it until his chest burned, what if’s jostling in his mind for supremacy: of what he could have thrown away, of what might have happened to him or to Jim had the Nidri not been able to fix what they’d caused. He wished he’d given Jim what he’d asked for, to try, to talk, to hold off until Jim could find a way to fix things… not hold off, but hold on. Hold on to what they had, to hold onto Jim when they each needed the other.

Jim’s hand rubbed his back as he breathed out shakily. “Bones?”

He breathed out harshly. “Don’t let me go.” Leonard’s whispered words were a plea, for here and now, for later when he inevitably walled himself off again, too caught up in what he was doing to notice anything around him.

Jim’s arms tightened around him, and warm lips pressed to the damp skin of his forehead. “I won’t.”

He’d screw things up again, he knew that. Neither of them were perfect and the life they led made everything so much harder to work with, but Jim’s words were a promise Leonard could believe in. He made his own promise then too, whispered into Jim’s neck to never let him go in return, no matter what.


End file.
